A Conspiracy of Faith (32 page)

Come on, Carl, he told himself. If a bloke called Gherkin with a braided beard can do it, you can, too.

He had shut his
wife away in a prison, trapped under heavy boxes, and there she could stay until it was over. She knew too much.

He had heard her scraping against the floor upstairs for a couple of hours, and later, when he came home with Benjamin, he heard her muffled groans.

Only now, after he had packed the boy’s things into the car, was she silent.

He inserted a CD of children’s songs in the car stereo and smiled at his son in the rearview mirror. An hour on the road and the boy would be asleep. A trip across Sjælland always did the trick.

His sister sounded sleepy on the phone but livened up no end when he told her how much he would give them for looking after Benjamin.

“You heard right,” he said. “Three thousand kroner a week. I’ll come by once in a while and make sure you’re doing it properly.”

“We’ll want a month in advance,” she said.

“OK.”

“As well as the usual on top.”

He nodded to himself. It was a predictable demand. “Same as usual, no need to worry.”

“How long will your wife be in the hospital?”

“I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see how it goes. She’s very ill. It might take time.”

No words of sympathy or regret were forthcoming.

Eva wasn’t like that.

“Go to your father,” his mother ordered him sharply. Her hair was tousled and her dress twisted up around her midriff. So his father had been rough with her again.

“What for?” he asked. “I’m supposed to finish reading Corinthians for the prayer meeting tomorrow. He told me to himself.”

With childlike naivete, he had believed his mother would save him. That she would intervene, extricate him from his father’s suffocating grip, and get him off the hook, just this once. His Chaplin impersonation was a game he liked to play. It was of no harm to anyone. Jesus must have played, too, when he was a child. They knew that.

“Get in there, now!” His mother’s lips tightened, and she took him by the scruff of the neck. It was the same grasp that had marched him off so many times before to beatings and humiliation.

“I’ll tell him you look at the neighbor when he takes his shirt off in the field,” he said.

She gave a start. They both knew it wasn’t true. That even the slightest glimpse toward liberty and a new life was a direct pathway to the inferno. They were reminded of it in church, in the prayers at table, and in each and every word read from the black volume residing close at hand in his father’s pocket. In every glance exchanged between man and woman, Satan lurked. Satan was in every smile and in every touch. That was what the book said.

No, it wasn’t true that his mother had eyes for the neighbor, but his father had never been known to give anyone the benefit of the doubt.

And then his mother said the words that divided them forever.

“You spawn of the Devil,” she spat, cold as ice. “May Satan drag you down to where you belong. May the inferno sear through your skin and deliver you into pain from this day forth.” She nodded emphatically. “Yes,
you may well be frightened, but Satan has already taken you. You are no longer ours to care about.”

She flung open the door and thrust him into the sherry fumes of his father’s study.

“Come here,” his father commanded, winding the belt around his hand.

The curtains were drawn, allowing only a sliver of light into the room. Behind the desk stood Eva, a pillar of salt in her white dress. Apparently, he had not beaten her, for his sleeves were still rolled down, and her sobs were restrained.

“Still playing Chaplin, are we?” his father barked.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Eva avert her gaze.

This would be violent.

“Here are Benjamin’s documents. Best they’re with you, in case he falls ill.”

He handed his brother-in-law the boy’s various certificates.

“Is that likely?” his sister asked anxiously.

“No, of course not. Benjamin’s a healthy boy.”

He saw it already in his brother-in-law’s eyes. Villy wanted more money.

“A boy Benjamin’s age eats a lot,” he said. “That’ll cost us a thousand a month on its own.” If he didn’t believe him, they could look it up on the Internet.

Villy rubbed his hands together like Ebenezer Scrooge. Five thousand extra, once and for all, was what they seemed to be asking.

But they wouldn’t be getting a penny more. Most likely it would be passed on to some preacher of the kind who couldn’t care less who was footing the bill or why.

“If you and Eva should cause me any difficulties, our arrangement may have to be reconsidered. Are you with me?” he said, and left it at that.

The brother-in-law agreed reluctantly, but his sister was already far away, her hands, unused to children, investigating the boy’s soft skin.

“What color is his hair now?” she asked, her blind eyes turned upward in delight.

“The same as mine when I was a boy, if you remember,” he said and noted how the lusterless eyes then dropped.

“And spare Benjamin the bloody prayers, understand?” he said finally, before handing them the money.

He saw them nod but didn’t care for their silence.

The ransom would be paid in twenty-four hours. One million kroner in used notes. He was in no doubt.

Now he would drive up to the boathouse and make sure the kids were in a decent state. Tomorrow, when the payoff had been made, he would go there again and kill the girl. The boy would be chloroformed and dumped in a field near Frederiks on the Monday night.

He would give Samuel instructions as to what to say to his father and mother, so they would know what they had to contend with. He was to say that his sister’s killer had his informants and would always know where the family were and what they were doing. That they had enough children for him to strike at them again, so they should never, ever feel safe. If he had the slightest suspicion that they had informed anyone of what had happened, it would cost them another child. This was what Samuel was to tell them. It was a threat with no expiration date. Moreover, they were to know that he operated only under an assumed identity. The man they thought they knew did not exist. He would appear again only in a new guise.

It had worked every time. The family had their faith to fall back on and would immerse themselves in it. The dead child would be mourned and the living would be shielded. The story of Job’s faith under trial was their anchor.

And all around them, in the circles in which they moved, their explanation of the child’s disappearance would be that she had been ostracized. In this case, it would be easy to believe. Magdalena stuck out, she shone,
and in their community this was no advantage. Her parents would say that she had been sent away to family. And the community would concern itself no more with the issue. He would be safe.

He smiled to himself.

Soon there would be one fewer of those who put God before man to pollute the world.

The dissolution of the pastor’s family occurred one day in winter, just weeks after his fifteenth birthday. In the months before, he had become aware that his body was changing, oddly and inexplicably. Sinful thoughts of the kind the community warned against had begun to pursue him. He saw a woman bend forward in a tight skirt, and that same evening he experienced his first, sudden ejaculation with her image on his retina.

He felt the sweat seeping from his armpits, and his voice trembled and lurched in all directions. The muscles of his neck became taut, and hair sprouted everywhere, dark and crinkly.

He felt like a molehill on a flat field.

When he made an effort, he could vaguely see himself in the boys of the congregation who had undergone the same transformation before him, but he had no idea what it was all about. The subject was never ever broached in the house his father referred to as “the home of God.”

For three years, his mother and father had addressed him only when it could not be avoided. They never saw the efforts he made, never noticed him trying hard to make amends at prayer meetings. To them, he was Satan’s image in the name of Chaplin. Nothing else. And whatever he might say or do could make no difference.

The congregation said he was strange and possessed, and they gathered in prayer so that no other child might become like him.

Only Eva stuck with him, and even she occasionally deserted him, and under pressure from their father would declare solemnly that he had spoken ill of his parents and wished not to obey them and heed the word of God.

Subsequently, his father had made it his second mission in life to break him down. Commands with no obvious point. A daily diet of ridicule and chastisement, with beatings and psychological terror for dessert.

To begin with, he had been able to seek comfort from one or two members of the congregation, but soon they too turned their backs on him. In such communities, the wrath of God towers tall above human compassion, and in its shadow the God-fearing individual looks only to the Lord and takes care of himself.

They chose sides and shied away. Eventually, all he could do was turn the other cheek.

Exactly as the Bible said.

And in this shadowy home in which nothing could breathe, the relationship between him and Eva slowly withered. How many times had she said she was sorry, and how many times had he turned a deaf ear?

Eventually, he no longer had even his sister, and on this day in winter everything broke.

“You sound like a squealing pig with that voice,” his father told him as they sat down at the table in the kitchen. “You look like one, too. A swine. Look at yourself. See how repulsive and fat you are. Use that ugly snout to sniff in your foul odor. Go and wash, you disgusting creature!”

Such was the baseness, such were the snide commands, one after another. Matters of little consequence, like this order to wash his hands before dinner, accumulated, until finally he felt he could no longer cope. And when his father’s outburst was over, he would no doubt have him scrubbing the walls of his room so that his smell might be purged.

So why not stand up to him?

“I suppose you want me to scrub my room with detergent before you’re satisfied and finished with all your ridiculous orders? Well, you can do it yourself, you old fart,” he spat.