Asylum (30 page)

“What one?”

He laughed. “My dear girl, you don’t really think I’d be willing to carry on as I’ve been doing as a benefit to my
employer
, do you?” He shook his head, still in apparent merriment, and moved, danced almost, out of my line of sight again. He was enjoying this. “Well, it
does
benefit my employer, of course. And I’m happy to do it, because Lansbury gave me everything. But this goes beyond Lansbury. This is a little more … visceral.” A pause. “You’re so very concerned about the orphans,” he said. “Well, I was one of them. One of the poor Duplessis orphans, living out my sad neglected existence at the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu.”

Whoa
. Merde, alors.

He was right: I hadn’t seen that one coming. Okay, so maybe he was the right age, but surely even an experience that horrific wouldn’t have driven him to … this. This wholesale torture, this sexual assault, this murder.

“I was one of the favorites,” Robert Carrigan continued, his voice behind me. “Out of hundreds of children. They recognized that I was special. I was such a good little helper to them, you see. I kept the other kids calm. They liked me. They trusted me. At first I did it to survive. You’d be amazed at what the human psyche will do to survive. What it can take. But after a while … it became exciting.”

“I have no idea—” I began, but he cut me off.

“Of course you don’t,” he said. “You’re a blundering idiot and hardly worth my time. But we
have
time, don’t you know, and it’s such a pleasant stroll down memory lane—
”

We clearly had different takes on what could be construed as pleasant.

His voice faded for a moment and I thought he moved somewhere else in the room, but then he was back. Not that I could have attempted any kind of escape in his absence. I couldn’t even feel my legs.

“At first I did it for survival,” Robert Carrigan said again. “Survival and the odd cigarette. We all had jobs, you see. All the orphans, anyone who was
compos mentis
enough to do anything, had to work. No idle hands at the asylum. No, indeed. There was a farm to run, there was food to prepare, and of course there were medical experiments to conduct.”

I hadn’t been so far off, then, when I called him a
nouveau
Mengele.

He was still talking. “I was assigned to the doctors. There was always a lot to do. Prepare the operating theater. Prepare the instruments. Clean up—aye, there’s the rub, there was always a lot to clean up afterward. And I won’t lie to you, it wasn’t easy at first. No: you mustn’t think I’m a monster. It wasn’t always easy. There was a time, yes, there was, a time when it made me sick. A time when I was like everybody else. Even like you, Martine. Some of the children—well, here’s the thing: I knew them. That made it more difficult. But the more I helped the doctors, the stronger I got. And the more I liked what I was doing.”

I was following, if at a distance. “You worked at the Cité de Saint-Jean-de-Dieu,” I said, wishing I could do more than lick my lips. My mouth felt like I’d swallowed ashes. “You helped the doctors.”

“You’re a little slow tonight, my dear. Try and keep up. Of course I helped the doctors. At first, it was just clean-up detail. Mopping up their mistakes, you might say. I was young and untested. They didn’t yet know my full potential. Even I didn’t know my full potential.”

There was a clatter as he dropped something, and he grunted as he bent down, presumably to pick it up. “Then I started taking an interest. It was extraordinary what I learned. I’ll be honest: I’d had no idea I could feel anything anymore. I thought the nuns had beaten that out of me. But down in the basement … my whole being, my whole inner self … words fail me, they really do. The best way to explain it is to say that I was
uncaged
.” His voice grew gentle, reverent. “It wasn’t just a coming of age, of having my way with the girls, the sort of thing that every young man goes through. This was different. It was more than that, deeper than that. It was spiritual.” Another pause. “There’s something remarkable that happens when someone’s about to die and they look into your eyes. Something deep and holy passes between you. It’s an
incredible
intimacy.”

You are
incredibly
off your rocker, I was thinking. “How did you get from being an orphan in an asylum to Lansbury Pharmaceuticals?” I asked. I had to ask something; I really didn’t want to hear any more about how magical it was to kill somebody.

“They weren’t monsters,” Robert Carrigan said. “Everyone has the wrong idea about them. They were trying to advance science. They wanted to learn the limits of the human brain, the human body, the human spirit. They were willing to keep at it, to try again and again and again to learn. They were the bravest of the brave. No one understood; no one ever understands. The world wants medical breakthroughs but the world doesn’t want to pay the price for them.”

“So the orphans did,” I said.

“Come on, Martine! Oh … I
can
call you Martine, can’t I? It’s a custom with me, a ritual, you might say. I always knew their names: I always said their names at that last moment. It was the least I could do for them, really. And my darling Martine, we’re going to get very, very intimate, you and I, very, very soon.” He paused, and then, as though bestowing a great privilege, he added, “And you may call me Bobby.”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t liking the way he was using the word
intimate
. I wondered how much of this he had shared with Isabelle, Caroline, Annie, Danielle.

“They were of no importance, the orphans,” Robert said. “Persons of no importance. Hadn’t their families made that clear? Hadn’t society made that clear? You can’t require us to lock people up, tuck them away so you don’t have to think about them—and
then
have issues with how they’re treated. It’s absurd. People can’t have it both ways.”

“Lansbury,” I reminded him. I didn’t want to start gagging.

“Lansbury was part of it from the start,” he replied. “Even when I was a boy in the asylum, when I was first getting involved, Lansbury Pharmaceuticals was underwriting the experiments. You think it was the
hospital
that paid the doctors? You think Ewen Cameron made money from the
asylum
? Not for a second. It was all Lansbury, from the beginning.” His voice got dreamy again. “From
my
beginning, too. My first awakening.”

He stopped and I heard the screech of a metal drawer opening. I didn’t want to think about what he was doing, what horrible instruments he was taking out of that drawer. Panic was rising and I was finding it hard to breathe. There was a voice inside me that was starting a mantra: I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die …

Robert found whatever he was looking for and shut the drawer. “Lansbury’s rep was almost always around. Everyone thought he was one of the doctors, but he wasn’t, he was the pharmaceutical rep. The salesman. And he’s the one who got to know me best. The doctors appreciated my help, but it was the rep who really saw my value. He was the one who offered to send me to medical school. I was in seventh heaven!”

I had to shut him up. My inner voice with its stupid mantra wasn’t getting me anywhere. And it was scaring me. “So how did you end up an attorney, Counselor?” I asked instead. “Second choice? Medical school didn’t want you?”

A louder clatter this time, and Robert swore viciously from behind me. I must have hit a nerve. Too bad I couldn’t hit any of my own. “They said”—and his voice was filled with rage—“they said that I didn’t qualify on psychological grounds.”

I laughed. Well, I
tried
to laugh, but it came out sounding like something between a squeak and a rumble. I moistened my lips before I tried to talk again. “You wanted to go into medicine so you could continue torturing people, and the medical establishment didn’t feel that was okay? You surprise me.”

“Lansbury Pharmaceuticals sent me to law school instead,” he said, and I was sobered to realize how quickly he’d gotten control of his anger back. That didn’t bode well for me. “They’ve taken care of me, every step of the way. I owe them everything.”

“So much that you have to repay it with murder?”

He laughed. “Actually, I probably owe
that
to them, too,” he said. “When I found out that that little
pute
was getting too close and I realized I had to do something about her … well, in the process, I rediscovered a part of myself that had been buried too long. Inadvertent but strangely logical, isn’t it, to come full circle like this? Poetic, almost.”

“Isabelle Hubert,” I said, nodding again like I’d discovered something significant.
Pute
was a rude colloquialism for prostitute.

“Isabelle Hubert,” he agreed. “Stupid cow thought she owed it to her mother—her
mother
, of all people—to expose the asylum. Asking all her clients questions about it. Trying to find out what no one was supposed to find out. I had to close her down. It doesn’t work like that.”

Light dawned. “She asked the wrong person,” I said slowly. “One of her clients was a bigwig at Lansbury.”

“Senior vice president of research,” Robert agreed, and I could almost feel him nodding behind me at the terrible gaffe that had cost Isabelle her life.

“And he told you that something had to be done?”

“Exactly. Though I don’t imagine he thought I’d take such a
personal interest
in it all. I expect that he meant me to do something to stop her legally, rather than permanently. But my solution was much neater.”

“They don’t know it’s you who’s been doing this?”

“Of course not. This wasn’t anyone’s idea but my own. Give me credit for
some
creativity here.” There was the sound of liquid being poured behind me; it was unnerving. I was so parched I wished it were being poured down my throat. “No one at Lansbury told me to kill anybody. That was all my own doing. Oh, someone there may have had suspicions. But I doubt it. I’ve been very, very careful. No one could prove anything, even if they thought they knew what I was doing. I was on my own with the killing.” A pause. “But what a discovery it was. All these years since I left the asylum,” he said reverently. “All these years had passed, and I’d thought that part of me had been cut off. That I’d never feel those feelings again. But it was only dormant. When I got her alone, I knew right away what I had to do. I didn’t even have to think about it. It brought back such memories! I felt alive again, alive for the first time in years.”

“Torturing her, you mean.”

“For heaven’s sake, Martine. You have no idea what you’re talking about. You’re misinformed by the popular press, by stupid TV shows. It’s nothing like that. I’m telling you, by the end, the torturer and the victim are bonded forever as one. There’s no greater intimacy than being there for the last breath, for being responsible for that last breath. Being with her, it was like the first time I ever did it, back at the asylum. And she screamed beautifully. It was touching, really, amazing. I could
almost
feel her pain, we were that close. We were
so
close.”

“But—
”

“You see, words just can’t explain it,” he interrupted. “The wonder of it. The magic of it all. You’ll understand, Martine, you’ll see, and you’ll agree, there’s nothing else like it. Being locked together, gazing into each other’s eyes while you take your last breath. There’s nothing in the world more exciting.”

I tried to fight down the panic. Lansbury had no idea what they’d unleashed. They must’ve asked their attorney to make the problem go away, expecting it to be done through paperwork and settlements and nondisclosure agreements. But Robert found his own way to make the problem go away, and he wasn’t going to stop. Not once he’d rediscovered his darkest demons.

“It wasn’t just Isabelle, though,” I said, trying to steer him away from that particular memory. “You killed Annie. She was there, too, at Saint-Jean-de-Dieu. Didn’t you remember her? Hadn’t you known her? Didn’t that make you feel something?”

“Of course it did!” he exclaimed. “You see, you do understand! Believe me when I tell you, Annie was the best! We shared so much before she died … so many memories. Her father was one of my heroes, one of my role models. It was a great honor, believe me.”

I was starting to gag now. I couldn’t move my arms. If I threw up, chances were good I’d choke on my own vomit. On second thought, maybe that would be a good idea. I really wasn’t anxious to experience Robert’s idea of intimacy. “And the Allan?” I asked, swallowing hard. “What about the Allan? Did you work there, too?”

“I’ve always taken an interest in the work of the Allan,” he said. “It’s amazing, really, what you can make people do, with the proper—
”

“Incentive?”

“—stimuli,” he finished.

“So there is a connection.” Between the Allan and the Cité de St.-Jean-de-Dieu.

“Of course there is. You really think Montréal is that large, that we wouldn’t have pooled resources? You’re as naïve as the police, as the public. No one understands what I’ve accomplished here. No one understands what a coup it was, taking care of these women.”

“You made their deaths look like the work of a serial sex killer,” I said. It was difficult to get the words out, my mouth was so dry and so parched; and it was a stupid statement. Of
course
it looked like the work of a serial sex killer: he
was
a serial sex killer.

“The rapes?” he asked. “The park benches? Tell me something, Martine, was that part too over the top? Really? I wondered, you know. Maybe too showy. Maybe too dramatic. And putting them all out there, it was the hardest part, of course. Timing it right to prop them up on the benches without being seen, tough, but oh, what a gesture! And when it hit the papers! It was like reliving everything again.
Very
exciting, Martine.”

There was a pause. Then, “I’ve even picked out your bench. You should feel flattered, considering all the thought I’ve put into you. You know, it’s absolutely true what they say, that anticipating something is almost as exciting as doing it. The Christmas Eve syndrome, I like to call it. I’ve been thinking about which bench would be yours for a long time now.”