The Whisperer (32 page)

As they were leaving, Gavila introduced himself to Nicla and explained what she was to do, although he was unable to conceal all his skepticism. He had seen all kinds of mediums at work, making their own contributions to the police. Very often their interventions produced a big fat nothing, or else they muddled the investigation by creating false leads and pointless expectations.

The nun wasn’t surprised by the criminologist’s wariness; she had seen that expression of disbelief on people’s faces many times.

Stern, being religious, wasn’t convinced by Nicla’s gift. As far as he was concerned, it was all mere charlatanism. But the fact that it was being practiced by a nun confused him. “At least she isn’t doing it for money,” he had said a little while before to an even more skeptical Sarah Rosa.

“I like that criminologist,” Nicla whispered confidentially to Mila as they were going upstairs. “He has misgivings, and he doesn’t try to hide them.”

The comment wasn’t the product of her gift. Mila understood that it came straight from her heart. Hearing those words from such a dear friend, Mila felt a surge of gratitude. The statement brushed away all the doubts that Sarah Rosa had tried to sow in her about Goran.

Joseph B. Rockford’s room was at the end of a wide corridor hung with tapestries.

The big windows pointed to the west, towards the sunrise. From the balconies you could enjoy the view of the valley below.

The four-poster bed was in the middle of the room. All around it, medical apparatus accompanied the billionaire’s last hours. They beat out a mechanical rhythm for him, made up of beeps from the heart rate monitor, the sighs and puffs of the respirator, repeated drips and a low and continuous electrical murmur.

Rockford’s torso was raised by several pillows, his arms rested along his hips on the embroidered bedcover, his eyes were closed. He wore a pair of raw-silk pajamas, pale pink in color, open at the neck to accommodate the endotracheal tube. The little hair he had was extremely white. His face was hollow, around an aquiline nose, and the rest of his body barely formed an outline under the blankets. He looked a hundred years old, when he was barely fifty.

At that moment a nurse was tending to the wound in his neck, changing the gauze around the nozzle that helped him breathe. Of all the staff who took turns around that bed twenty-four hours a day, they had been allowed to see only his private doctor and the doctor’s assistant.

When the members of the team crossed the threshold, their eyes met those of Lara Rockford, who would not have missed this scene for the world. She was sitting in an armchair, apart from the others, smoking in defiance of all hygienic rules. When the nurse had pointed out that this was perhaps not a great idea given the critical condition of her brother, she had replied simply, “It can’t hurt him anyway.”

Nicla walked confidently towards the bed, watching this privileged death scene. A death so different from the wretched ones that she saw every day at the Port. As she came close to Joseph B. Rockford she made the sign of the cross. Then she turned back to Goran, saying, “We can start.”

They couldn’t record what was about to happen. Never in a million years would a jury accept it as evidence. And neither could the press find out about this experiment. Everything had to stay within these walls.

Boris and Stern took up their positions, standing beside the closed door. Sarah Rosa went to stand in a corner and leaned against the wall with her arms crossed over her chest. Nicla went to sit in a chair beside the bed. Mila sat next to her. Facing them was Goran, who wanted to keep a close eye on both Rockford and the nun.

The medium began to concentrate.

Mila didn’t know where Joseph B. Rockford really was at that moment. Perhaps he was there with them, and perhaps he could even hear them. Or else he had already gone down far enough to rid himself of his own fantasies.

But she was sure of one thing: Nicla might have to fall into a deep and treacherous abyss to find him.

“Ah, I’m beginning to feel something…”

Nicla’s hands rested on her knees. Mila noticed that her fingers were beginning to contract with tension.

“Joseph is still here,” the medium announced. “But he is very…far away. However, he can still perceive something of what’s happening up here…”

Sarah Rosa exchanged a puzzled glance with Boris. He couldn’t help giving an embarrassed half-smile, but managed to keep it in check.

“He is very disturbed. He is angry…he can’t bear the fact that he’s still here…he wants to go away, but he can’t. Something’s holding him back…he can’t stand the smell.”

“What smell?” asked Mila.

“The smell of rotting flowers. He says it’s unbearable.”

They sniffed the air, hoping for confirmation of those words, but all they could smell was a pleasant perfume: there was a big vase of fresh flowers on the windowsill.

“Try and make him speak, Nicla.”

“I don’t think he wants to…no, he doesn’t want to talk to me…”

“You’ve got to persuade him.”

“I’m sorry…”

“What?”

But the medium didn’t finish the sentence. Instead she said: “I think he wants to show me something…yes, that’s it…he’s showing me a room…this room. But we aren’t there. Neither are the machines that are keeping him alive right now…” Nicla stiffened: “There’s someone with him.”

“Who is it?”

“A woman, she’s beautiful…I think it’s his mother.”

From the corner of her eye Mila saw Lara Rockford stirring in the armchair as she lit her umpteenth cigarette.

“What’s he doing?”

“Joseph is very small…she is holding him on her knees and explaining something to him…she is telling him off and warning him…she’s telling him that the world out there can only hurt him. So he’s better off staying here, he will be safe. She’s promising to protect him, to take care of him, never to leave him…”

Goran and Mila looked at one another. That was how Joseph’s gilded prison had begun, with his mother removing him from the world.

“She’s telling him that of all the world’s dangers, women are the worst. The world out there is full of women who want to take everything from him…they will only love him for what he owns…they will deceive him, and take advantage of him…” Then the nun said again, “I’m sorry…”

Mila looked at Goran again. That morning the criminologist had confidently asserted, in Roche’s presence, that the origin of Rockford’s rage—the same rage that would in time turn him into a serial killer—lay in the fact that he couldn’t accept he was the way he was. Because someone, probably his mother, had one day discovered his sexual preferences, and had never forgiven him. Killing his partner meant erasing the guilt.

But plainly Gavila was wrong.

The medium’s story partially contradicted his theory. Joseph’s homosexuality could be linked to his mother’s phobias. Perhaps she knew about her son and said nothing.

But in that case, why did Joseph kill his partners?

“I wasn’t even allowed to invite a girlfriend…”

Everyone turned to look at Lara Rockford. The young woman gripped her cigarette between trembling fingers, and stared at the ground as she spoke.

“It was his mother who brought these boys here,” said Goran.

And she confirmed his words: “Yes, and she paid them.”

The tears began to pour from her one good eye, turning her face into a mask even more grotesque than before.

“My mother hated me.”

“Why?” asked the criminologist.

“Because I was a woman.”

“I’m sorry,”
Nicla said again.

“Shut up!” Lara yelled, looking at her brother.

“I’m sorry, little sister…”

“Shut up!”

She yelled it in a furious voice, rising to her feet. Her chin trembled.

“You can’t imagine. You don’t know what it means to turn and find those eyes on you. A gaze that follows you everywhere, and you know what it means. Even though you don’t want to admit it, because the very idea disgusts you. I think he was trying to understand…why he felt attracted to me.”

Nicla was in a trance, trembling violently, as Mila held her hand.

“That’s why you left home, isn’t it?” Goran stared at Lara Rockford, trying to win her reply at all costs. “And it was then that he began killing…”

“Yes, I think that’s what happened.”

“Then you came back, five years ago…”

Lara Rockford laughed. “I knew nothing about it. He tricked me, saying he felt alone and abandoned by everyone. That I was his sister and he loved me, and we had to make peace. That everything else was fixations on my part. I believed him. When I came here, he behaved normally for the first few days: he was sweet and affectionate, he paid attention to me. He didn’t seem like the Joseph I’d known as a little girl. Until…”

She laughed again. And that laughter said more than words could have done about all the violence to which she had been subjected.

“It wasn’t a car accident that left you like this.”

Lara shook her head. “This way he could be absolutely sure that I would never leave again.”

They felt terribly sorry for that young woman, a prisoner not of that house but of her own appearance.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she limped towards the door, dragging her ruined leg as she did so.

Stern and Boris stepped aside to let her pass. Then they turned to look at Goran, waiting for him to take a decision.

He turned to Nicla. “Do you feel like going on?”

“Yes,” replied the nun, although the effects of her exertion were clearly apparent.

The next question was the most important of all. They would have no chance to do it again. It wasn’t only the survival of the sixth child that depended on it, it was theirs as well. Because if they failed to discover the meaning of what had been happening for days, they would bear the marks of events for ever.

“Nicla, make Joseph tell us when he met the man who was like him…”

A
t night he heard her screaming.

It was the migraines that gave her no peace and didn’t let her sleep. By now not even the morphine could calm her sudden twinges. She stretched out in the bed and shrieked until she lost her voice. Her former beauty, which she had tried so carefully to preserve from the inexorable withering of age, had vanished entirely. And she had become vulgar. She, who had always paid such attention to her words, who had been so measured, had become coarse and fanciful in her cursing. She had curses for everyone. For her husband, who had died too soon. For her daughter, who had run away from her. And for God who had left her like that.

He alone could placate her.

He went into her room and tied her hands to the bed with a silk scarf so that she couldn’t hurt herself. She had already pulled out all her hair and her face was streaked with coagulated blood from all the times she had plunged her nails into her cheeks.

“Joseph,” she called him as he stroked her forehead. “Tell me I was a good mother. Tell me, please.”

And he, staring into eyes that were filling with tears, told her.

Joseph B. Rockford was thirty-two. And he was only eighteen years from his date with death. Not long before, a famous geneticist had been called in to check if Joseph would share the fate of his father and grandfather. Given the scant knowledge at the time concerning the genetic heredity of illnesses, the answer had been vague: the probability that this rare syndrome had been at work in him since birth varied between forty and seventy percent.

Since then, Joseph had lived with that one goal ahead of him. Everything else just brought him one stage closer. Like his mother’s illness. The nights in the big house were shaken by her inhuman cries echoing around the big rooms. It was impossible to escape. After months of forced sleeplessness, Joseph had started putting in earplugs just to keep from hearing her agony.

But they weren’t enough.

One morning, at around four o’clock, he had woken up. He was having a dream, but he couldn’t remember it. But that wasn’t what woke him up. He had sat up in bed, trying to work out what it had been.

There was an unusual silence in the house.

Joseph understood. He got up and put his clothes on: a pair of trousers, a high-necked jumper and his green Barbour. Then he left the room, passing by the closed door of his mother’s bedroom and walking on. He came down the imposing marble stairs and, in a few minutes, he was outside.

He walked down the long avenue of the estate until he reached the west gate, which was normally used by servants and deliverymen. It was the boundary of his world. He and Lara had made their way here so many times in their childhood explorations. Even though she was much younger than him, his sister would have liked to go beyond it, demonstrating an enviable courage. But Joseph had always pulled back. Lara had left almost a year before. After she had found the strength to cross that limit, nothing more had been heard from her. He missed her terribly.

In that cold November morning, Joseph stood motionless by the gate for several minutes. Then he climbed over it. When his feet touched the ground, a new sensation took hold of him, a tickle in the middle of his chest that spread all around him. For the first time in his life he experienced the meaning of joy.

He walked along the asphalt road.

Dawn was heralded by a glow on the horizon. The landscape around him was exactly the same as the landscape of the estate, and for a moment he had a sense that he hadn’t actually left the place, and that the gate was only a pretext, because the whole of creation began and ended there, and every time he passed through that boundary he would start again from the beginning, unchanged, and so on until infinity. An interminable series of identical parallel universes. Sooner or later he would see his house emerging from the path again, and he would know for certain that it had been nothing but an illusion.

But it didn’t happen. As the distance grew, the awareness that he could do it came to the surface.

There was no one in sight. Not a car, not a house. The sound of his footsteps on the tarmac was the only trace of humanity amidst the song of the birds as they began to reclaim the new day. No wind stirred the trees, which seemed to stare at him as he passed, like a stranger. And he had been tempted to greet them. The air was effervescent, and it had a smell. Of frost, dry leaves and fresh green grass.

The sun was more than a promise now. It slipped across the fields, spreading and spreading like a tide of oil. Joseph couldn’t have said how many miles he had walked. He was headed nowhere. But that was the great thing: he didn’t care. Lactic acid pulsed through the muscles of his legs. He had never suspected that pain could be pleasant. He had energy in his body, and air to breathe. Those two variables would decide the rest. For once he didn’t want to think about things. Until that day his mind had always found some new anxiety to block his way. And since the unknown still lay in wait all around him, during those few moments he had already learned that apart from danger, it could also harbor something precious. Like astonishment, like wonder.

That was exactly what he felt when he became aware of a new sound. It was low and far off, but steadily approaching, behind him. He soon recognized it: it was the noise of a car. He turned round and saw only its roof appearing beyond a hump. Then the car went into a dip before reappearing. It was an old beige station wagon. It was coming towards him. The windscreen was so dirty that it was impossible to see the passengers. Joseph decided to ignore it, turned round and started walking again. When the car was close to him, it seemed to slow down.

“Hey!”

He hesitated to turn round. Perhaps it was someone wanting to put an end to his adventure. Yes, that was it. His mother had woken up and started shouting his name. Not finding him in bed, she had let the servants loose in and out of the estate. Perhaps the man calling out to him was one of the gardeners who had come looking for him in his own car, hoping for a handsome reward.

“Hey, you, where’re you going? You want a lift?”

The question reassured him. It couldn’t be someone from the house. The car pulled up beside him. Joseph couldn’t see the driver. He stopped, and so did the car.

“I’m going north,” said the man at the wheel. “I could save you a few miles’ walk. It’s not much, but you won’t find many other lifts around here.”

His age was indeterminable. He might have been forty, maybe less. His beard was reddish, long and disheveled, making it hard to guess. His hair was long too, and he wore it combed back with a center parting. His eyes were gray.

“So what do you want to do? Are you getting in?”

Joseph thought for a moment, then said, “Yes, thanks.”

He sat down beside the stranger and the car set off. The seats were covered with brown velvet, and worn in places, revealing the canvas underneath. There was a smell that was a mix of car deodorants superimposed over one another over the years, hanging from the rearview mirror. The backseat had been lowered to make a bigger space, now occupied by cardboard boxes and plastic bags, tools and jerry cans of various sizes. Everything was perfectly arranged. There were traces of old stickers on the dashboard. The car radio, an old model with a tape machine, was playing a country music cassette. The driver, who had lowered the volume to talk to him, turned it back up again.

“Walking long?”

Joseph avoided his eye, for fear that he might notice he was lying.

“Yes, since yesterday.”

“Weren’t hitching?”

“Yes, I was. A truck driver gave me a lift, but he had to go in a different direction.”

“Why, where’re you going?”

He wasn’t expecting that, and told the truth.

“I don’t know.”

The man started laughing.

“If you don’t know, why did you let the trucker go?”

Joseph turned to look at him seriously. “Because he asked too many questions.”

The man laughed even louder. “My God, I like your directness, kid.”

He was wearing a red, short-sleeved windcheater. His trousers were light brown and his knitted woolen jumper had a pattern of rhomboids. He wore working boots, with a reinforced rubber sole. He gripped the wheel with both hands. On his left wrist he wore a cheap plastic quartz watch.

“Listen, I don’t know what your plans are and I won’t press you to tell me but, if you feel like it, I live not far from here and you could come for breakfast. What do you say?”

Joseph was about to say no. It had already been risky enough accepting a lift, now he wasn’t going to follow this man somewhere to let him rob him or worse. But then he realized that he was just being influenced by another of his fears. The future was
mysterious,
not
threatening
—as he had discovered that very morning. And to savor its fruits, you had to take risks.

“OK.”

“Eggs, bacon and coffee,” the stranger promised.

Twenty minutes later they left the main road to go up a dirt track. They traveled slowly, with holes and bumps, until they reached a wooden house with a sloping roof. The white paint covering it had flaked off in places. The porch was dilapidated, and tufts of grass poked out here and there among the planks. They parked beside the front door.

Who is this guy?
Joseph wondered when he saw where he lived, aware that the answer wouldn’t be as interesting as the possibility of exploring his world.

“Welcome,” said the man as soon as they crossed the threshold.

The first room was middle-sized. The furniture consisted of a table and three chairs, a sideboard with a few drawers missing and an old sofa with its upholstery torn in several places. An unframed painting showing an anonymous landscape hung from one of the walls.

Beside the only window was a soot-stained stone fireplace containing cold, blackened logs. On a stool carved from a tree trunk, several pans encrusted with burnt fat stood in a pile. At the end of the room were two closed doors.

“Sorry, there’s no bathroom. But outside there’s a whole load of trees,” the man added, laughing.

There was no electricity or running water, either, but soon the man went out to the back of the car and took out the jerry cans that Joseph had noticed a short time before.

With some old newspapers and wood that he had collected outside, he lit the fire in the fireplace. After cleaning one of the pans as best he could, he started frying up some butter and then threw in the eggs and the bacon. Second rate it might have been, but the food gave off a smell that would have given you an appetite.

Joseph watched him curiously, tormented by questions, like the ones children ask adults when they reach the age at which they begin to discover the world. But the man didn’t seem annoyed—he seemed to like talking.

“Have you been living here long?”

“For a month, but this isn’t my house.”

“What does that mean?”

“That thing out there is my real house,” he said, pointing his chin at the car parked outside. “I travel the world.”

“Why have you stopped, then?”

“Because I like this place. One day I was driving along the road and I saw the path. I turned off onto it and found myself here. The house had been abandoned for God knows how long. It probably belonged to some farm laborers: there’s a tool shed out the back.”

“What happened to them?”

“Oh, I don’t know. They must have done the same as so many others: when there was a crisis in the country, they went in search of a better life in the city. There are plenty of abandoned farms around here.”

“Why didn’t they try to sell the property?”

The man laughed: “Who would buy a place like this? You can’t get a cent out of land like this, my friend.”

He stopped cooking and poured the contents of the pan straight onto the plates laid out on the table. Joseph, without waiting, plunged his fork into the yellow mush. He had discovered he was very hungry. The smell was terrific.

“You like it, don’t you? Well, eat away, there’s as much as you want.”

Joseph went on greedily wolfing it down. Then, with his mouth full, he asked, “Are you going to stay here for long?”

“I thought I would go at the end of the month: the winters are hard around here. I’m getting some supplies together and then I’ll go out looking for other abandoned farms, in the hope of finding some things that might still be useful in some way. This morning I found a toaster. I think it’s broken, but I can fix it.”

Joseph registered everything, as if putting together a kind of manual with all kinds of ideas in it: how to make an excellent breakfast with only eggs, butter and bacon, and how to get hold of drinking water. Perhaps he thought they would be useful in a new life. The stranger’s life struck him as enviable. It might have been hard, but it was infinitely better than the one he had lived until then.

“You know we haven’t even introduced ourselves?”

Joseph’s hand, still clutching its fork, froze in midair.

“If you don’t want to tell me your name, that’s fine by me. I like you anyway.”

Joseph went on eating. The man didn’t press the point, but he felt obliged to repay him in some way for his hospitality. He decided to tell him something about himself.

“I’m almost certainly going to die when I’m fifty.”

And he told him about the curse on the male heirs of his family. The man listened attentively. Without naming names, Joseph explained to the man that he was rich, and told him the origin of his wealth. Of that courageous and astute grandfather who had planted the seed of a great fortune. And he also told him about his father, who had enlarged the legacy with his entrepreneurial genius. Finally he talked about himself, about the fact that he had no other targets to reach, because everything had already been won. He had come into the world to pass on only two things: a huge fortune and an inexorably fatal gene.

“I understand that the sickness that killed your father and grandfather is inevitable, but for the money there’s always a solution: why not give up your wealth if you don’t feel free enough?”