The Devil's Sanctuary (30 page)

DANIEL LOOKED
at him in astonishment. Doctor Fischer was without any shadow of a doubt a bewildering character.

“In that case, I don’t understand why you’ve been keeping me here.”

“Because I’m not finished with you yet, my friend. You interest me a great deal, you know. In fact I find you the most interesting of my patients. My favorite patient, if you like.”

He chuckled happily over the rim of his teacup.

“But I’m only here by mistake,” Daniel objected.

The doctor shook his head firmly.

“Oh, no. Oh, no. That was no mistake. You see,” he said, putting his cup down, “I was interested in you the moment I found out that you existed.”

“And when did you find that out?”

“When Max was admitted here. I saw in his file that he had a brother with the same date of birth, a twin in other words. As I’m sure you know, twins are a dream come true for anyone researching human nature. If they’re identical twins, of course, and I soon found out that that was the case with you.”

“How?” Daniel asked, with a growing sense of unease.

“I have a wide network of international contacts. I can find out most things about our residents and their relatives. It’s part of my job. I found out that you had no criminal convictions and had a decent career, which made me even more interested. You ought by rights to have inherited the same characteristics as Max. Why is he a psychopath and you aren’t? Or”—Karl Fischer leaned forward, frowned in mock sternness, and pointed at Daniel—“are you just better at hiding it?”

Daniel gasped, insulted.

“So you’re suggesting…”

“No, no, no. It’s far too early to be suggesting anything. But the possibility exists that you’re a
different sort
of psychopath. One who doesn’t act rashly and impulsively. Who has the patience to wait for the right opportunity and is calm enough to tidy up after himself and conceal what he’s done. Who can calculate reward and risk. And who therefore never gets caught for any crime. We in Himmelstal never get to see psychopaths of that sort. This is the most interesting type of psychopath, and hardly any research has been done into them.”

Daniel snorted.

“I’ve heard so much rubbish since I got here that nothing surprises me anymore. How do you actually know that that sort even exists if they never get caught? Have you ever met one?”

Doctor Fischer leaned his head back, appeared to reflect for a moment, then said, “In my whole life I’ve met only two, possibly three, psychopaths of that sort. They’re very difficult to recognize. And the reason why I couldn’t unmask them was quite simply”—he gestured apologetically—“that I myself am one of them.”

“You have an odd sense of humor, Doctor Fischer.”

The doctor shook his head.

“I’m completely serious. I had the typical childhood for a psychopath: I stole money from my mother’s purse, I hit my friends if they didn’t do as I said, and I took great pleasure in torturing toads, cats, and any other animals I could get hold of. I’m practically a textbook example. It seemed perfectly natural to me. I assumed that everyone was like me.”

“None of that is particularly unusual among children,” Daniel said in a well-intentioned attempt to alleviate the doctor’s unpleasant supposition.

But Karl Fischer persisted. “That sort of behavior is
extremely
unusual among children who grow up in comfortable circumstances. Of course I soon learned that behavior of that sort led to punishment and wasn’t beneficial to me in the long term. As a result I had to one, select actions that would truly be to my advantage. And two, carry them out in complete secrecy. But you’ve hardly touched your tea. Don’t you like it? The taste is a little unusual, but once you get used to it it’s easy to get rather addicted to it.”

“I like it,” Daniel said, obediently taking several large sips.

Karl Fischer looked happy.

The taste really
was
rather unusual. It tasted of Christmas—cinnamon, cloves, cardamom—and something else, something dry and bitter that was hard to identify.

Daniel wasn’t at all sure how to read Karl Fischer. Did he mean what he was saying, or was his astonishing confession just an expression of some sort of dark professional sense of humor? Either way, he didn’t seem to be the right person to talk to, and Daniel made up his mind to conclude the visit as quickly as he could.

But the doctor leaned back and went on: “When I was young my parents were terribly worried about me, but once I started school they became extremely proud of me. Everyone said I had ‘matured.’ I was very intelligent, skipped two grades, and outside school I carried on my own studies at a level that astonished everyone around me. I studied mathematics, biology, and chemistry, but what interested me most was medicine. How human beings are constructed. The skeleton that holds us up. The heart that pumps life into us. The brain that produces thoughts, memories, and dreams, then hides them away in its nooks and crannies. It fascinated me immensely. I believe I was seeking an answer to who I was in all of this. Because it was abundantly clear to me that I wasn’t the same as everyone else.”

With growing surprise Daniel listened to his doctor. He didn’t know what to think.

“Empathy, love, and compassion were alien emotions to me. I kept hearing about them. As concepts they were as familiar to me as the jungles of Africa. I knew what they looked like, but I had never been there, so to speak.” The doctor went on calmly: “And I realized that I was never going to get there. At the same time, it was quite clear to me that these strange ideas were regarded as entirely natural by everyone else. Like someone who can’t read, I learned various strategies to hide my shortcomings. I became good at watching and imitating other people’s behavior. I learned when you were supposed to cry, comfort someone, or tell them you love them. During my early teenage years I was regarded as a bit odd and anxious, but I smoothed off most of the rough edges over time. When I was studying medicine the other students would say that I was spontaneous, charming, even sensitive. You’re looking at me so oddly, Daniel. Is there something you recognize in what I’m saying?”

Daniel shook his head in amazement.

“I’ve never heard anything like it.”

Karl Fischer smiled.

“And even if you did recognize something, you wouldn’t admit it, would you? This is the last thing anyone would admit to. This is the big secret.
That one isn’t a proper person.
”

“You still seem to have done well in life,” Daniel said.

“Naturally. I’ve built up a magnificent career. Without feelings, one has so many more opportunities, of course. Research findings can be falsified. Competitors can be gotten rid of. A drowning accident, a fall from a balcony during a rowdy party, an unexplained fatal mugging late one night at a conference. Not to mention the drugs that a doctor has access to, and which in high doses can lead to tragic cases of suicide.”

Daniel gasped, but before he could say anything Karl Fischer had leaned over and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

“Those are just examples, my friend. Possibilities. You’re not getting any facts.”

The doctor fell silent and reached for his cup.

Daniel became aware of a ventilator rumbling somewhere and clung to the idea of fresh alpine air being pumped down to them.

Fischer sipped his tea, then went on quietly: “When I was young I committed a number of serious crimes. Physical abuse and property crimes. I was never caught. When I got older I lost interest in doing that. The reward seldom matched the risk. By that time I had also discovered a subject that absorbed all my time and energy: psychopathy. I realized that most people studying this area had no idea what they were talking about. They just concentrated on the impulse-driven troublemakers, while the quiet, smart ones were ignored. Does it upset you, me talking about this sort of thing?”

While the doctor was talking Daniel had been feeling colder and colder. He was thinking of the two doors that Karl Fischer had had to unlock when they arrived.

“IF YOU
don’t mind, I think I’d rather talk about something else,” Daniel said. He was trying not to look at the door. “So, you know I’m not Max, and that you have no right to hold me here. I came here because Max wanted to see me—”

Karl Fischer interrupted with a wave of the hand. “No, no, no. Completely wrong. You came here because
I
wanted to see you. Your brother hadn’t expressed any such desire. But when I saw that Max had a brother I decided to get you here to Himmelstal.”

“
You
decided, Doctor Fischer?”

“Of course. It’s common knowledge that inherited factors play a role in psychopathy—there’s a certain amount of dispute about just how great a role. I said earlier that I’ve only met two or three psychopaths of the perfectly controlled variety. One of those was my own father. He hid it well and was a well-regarded eye specialist with an impeccable reputation. But there was something about him that I recognized, and the older I got the more sure of it I became. Now, if father and son can bear the same inheritance, surely that should apply in even greater measure to identical twins?”

He paused, screwed up one eye, and peered slyly at Daniel with the other.

“You said you were the one who got me here,” Daniel said. “How?”

He leaned forward as if he were interested in what the doctor had to say, but he was actually looking at the door. The outer door had required a code to get in. Did it need a code if you wanted to get out as well? That would obviously be crazy from a fire-safety perspective. But Daniel had already discovered that fire safety wasn’t a particular priority here at the clinic.

“I was done with Max,” Karl Fischer said abruptly. “After just a few conversations with him I realized that he was rather uninteresting. His history before he arrived here and a few incidents with other residents suggested that he was an impulse-driven troublemaker who turned to violence without any thought of the consequences. And we’ve got plenty of those here. You were the one I was interested in, but obviously it was impossible for me to bring a law-abiding, decent member of society into Himmelstal. When I saw some recent pictures of you on the Internet I was struck by just how similar you were. So I decided to switch the twins over. It wasn’t hard to persuade Max. He was overjoyed at my plan and wrote you that letter. When I read it I let it go out with the staff’s mail rather than via the censor.”

“And you changed the date of birth in his records?”

“I did that just after Max arrived. But evidently you’ve managed to get hold of an earlier printout. Can I ask how you got it?”

Daniel remained silent.

“Well, it doesn’t matter now. In those pictures on the Internet you had a beard and fairly wild hair, and glasses, which cheered me up, because of course Max had no beard and didn’t wear glasses. I encouraged him to carry on shaving and getting his hair cut really short so that the fact that you were twins wouldn’t be too obvious when you arrived. And it all worked perfectly, didn’t it? Max got his freedom and I got the twin I really wanted. And officially nothing at all had happened, except for Max having his older brother to visit for a few days. The fact that he behaved slightly oddly after that and began to make bizarre claims is just the sort of thing you’d expect in a place like this, isn’t it?”

Daniel nodded mechanically. He was having trouble concentrating on what Doctor Fischer was saying. He was tired and his thoughts had started to wander in a peculiar way, beyond his control, the way they usually did before he fell asleep. What was the time, anyway? How long had he been sitting here listening to Doctor Fischer? And where was “here” exactly? For a moment he got the idea that he was in the home of an older colleague whose apartment he had once visited in Brussels. Then he realized he was staring at the books on the other side of the room, convinced that they belonged to his grandfather, the professor of linguistics, and that if he left the room he would find himself on Götavägen in Uppsala.

“You look tired,” Doctor Fischer said. “I’m something of a night owl; this is when I’m at my most alert. I tend to forget that not everyone is like that.”

“Yes, I wouldn’t have any objection to going back to my cabin now. What you’ve told me has left me feeling rather disconcerted, Doctor Fischer. I need to digest it,” Daniel replied.

The doctor nodded.

“That’s entirely understandable. We’re almost at the end of our conversation. In which
you
took the initiative. Not me,” he added, pointing his forefinger at Daniel with a slight smile.

Then he noticed that his teacup was empty and stood up.

“Shall I top you up as well?”

“No, thanks.”

When Doctor Fischer disappeared into the little kitchen, Daniel walked quickly over to the door. He tried the handle and found that it was locked. Doctor Fischer went on talking from the kitchen.

“Seeing as Gisela Obermann had been in charge of Max, obviously she became responsible for you as well. A strange woman. When she popped up with her silly ideas about multiple personalities it was time for me to take over. She seemed to have become rather obsessed with you and had lost her professional focus.”

When Doctor Fischer appeared again, Daniel had just sat back down in his wing chair.

“Gisela is far too weak a character to work in Himmelstal, and recently she’s been exhausted and nervous. I ought to have sent her home a long time ago, but she’s had problems in her private life and has nowhere to go. I do hope things are going to work out for her,” the doctor said, settling himself down again.

“What about Max?” Daniel asked. “Where is he? Is he here in the valley?”

“Here?” Karl Fischer burst out laughing. “Oh, no. He won’t be returning here of his own volition, you can be sure of that. I’ve got no idea where he is.”

“But I heard his voice in those phone messages,” Daniel pointed out. “The cell phones can’t receive calls from outside. He must have been in the valley if he was able to reach me.”

“I recorded his messages before he left Himmelstal. I’ve got a number of others that he read out for me as well, but I just used the ones that were most suitable when I called you. Max said you usually keep your phone switched off, only turning it on every now and then to check your messages and missed calls.”

Daniel was staring at him in astonishment.

“Why did you do that?”

“Because you, if you don’t mind me saying, were a fairly dull subject for study. Apart from your attempt to escape, which I was obviously expecting, you were behaving in an exemplary fashion. You hardly ever went anywhere, and the only person you spent any time with was your secret guardian. Your “cricket,” as the imaginative Doctor Pierce prefers to call them. The only time you resorted to violence was when you went to the defense of a helpless resident who was being tortured, thus giving you hero status with the more credulous of my colleagues and prompting poor Gisela to make a proper fool of herself with her silly ideas. I had you taken into the care center and performed a couple of tests that turned out to be a severe disappointment to me. The MRI scan showed no abnormalities in your brain activity upon emotional stimulus. Your brain didn’t react at all like a psychopath’s brain. In other words, it responded to emotional triggers as if they were cognitive. And my practical test with the fire disproved my theory entirely.”

“Test? So the fire wasn’t caused by Marko smoking in bed?”

Karl Fischer held out the palm of his hand.

“I just helped him a little. Stronger sleeping pills than usual, a lit cigarette placed in his bed when he was asleep. A smoke machine from the theater made the whole thing look worse than it was. You behaved like a proper little Boy Scout. A great disappointment, as I said. So I led you to Keller to see if anything would happen there. There’s almost always something happening at Adrian Keller’s.”

“So were you at Keller’s, then?”

“Of course. Kowalski and Sørensen drove me up there. As you’ve probably worked out, I have rather good relations with those gentlemen. They help me with my research, and I help them with other things in return. Plenty of things have happened in Keller’s house that are of great interest to a behaviorist with my specialty, and occasionally—but only when he himself wants to, because he’s a man of great integrity—he allows his living room to be used for experiments. The mirror in his living room is a one-way window. My observations there have led me to write a number of completely unique research papers about what people are capable of doing to one another. Obviously I can’t publish them under current circumstances.”

Daniel’s anger had woken him up, and he had to stop himself from attacking Karl Fischer.

“A one-way mirror? So you could
see
me?”

“I had a front row seat. But sadly you left the stage earlier than anticipated. You were interrupted by a hare, wasn’t that it? And you thought it was a child.”

He chuckled, then stopped himself and said seriously, “A child, ah yes! Of course. You’re going to be a father. But you haven’t said who the mother is.”

He leaned forward, blinking expectantly.

Daniel hesitated before replying. Instinctively he felt that he shouldn’t reveal his relationship with Corinne. Possibly to protect her. Or simply because it seemed to be the only thing that Karl Fischer didn’t know about him. He wanted to hold on to that card for a while longer.

“That’ll come out in time.”

“Hmm. Yes, things usually do,” Fischer said thoughtfully. “But what if she’s deceiving you? Maybe she isn’t pregnant at all? Have you seen the result of the pregnancy test?”

Daniel said nothing. What if the doctor was right?

“Let me guess who it is.”

Karl Fischer leaned his head back against his chair, closed his eyes, and pretended to think.

“Samantha?” he suggested.

Daniel remained silent. Fischer took that as confirmation.

“I thought as much.” He chuckled happily. “Perhaps I ought to tell you that Samantha usually gets pregnant about ten times a year. Of course she’s no more fertile than a bullock, but in her imagination she’s always getting fertilized, and to make the whole thing seem more realistic she makes sure to have an active sex life with various men. Do you know her background, before she came to the valley?”

“No.”

“It’s rather tragic. At the age of sixteen she ran away from home with her boyfriend, who was considerably older, and a violent drug addict. Samantha was pregnant but didn’t want an abortion. In the eighth month the boyfriend kicked the fetus to death in her stomach and she was forced to give birth to a dead child. In conjunction with that she suffered a severe psychotic episode and was admitted to a psychiatric ward, where they pumped her full of drugs and discharged her without giving her any actual treatment. She moved back in with her parents, broke off all contact with the boyfriend, and started work as a nursing assistant in a maternity ward. She seemed utterly charmed by the babies, constantly fussing over them, never wanting to take her breaks. Then there were several sudden deaths among the babies. Then a few more. But only in Samantha’s ward. The staff was put under surveillance, and Samantha was found out. She smothered the first one with a pillow. Then she put drugs in their bottles. Hasn’t anyone told you this?”

“Yes, now that you come to mention it,” Daniel muttered. “But I never quite realized…”

“You don’t like to believe it, do you? Samantha’s a very attractive young woman, after all. In the prison she ended up in she flirted outrageously with the male staff, practically throwing herself at them. For one of them the temptation evidently got to be too much, because in spite of the fact that she had only received visits from her mother, she got pregnant. She was made to have an abortion. She put up violent resistance and had to be taken to the abortion clinic under sedation. After a while she was pregnant again. This time she managed to conceal the pregnancy until it was too late for an abortion. She gave birth under strict guard, and immediately after the birth the child was taken away from her. She went mad on the ward, got hold of a pair of scissors, and stabbed one of the nurses in the jugular and a heavily pregnant patient in the stomach. Shortly after that she was brought to Himmelstal. My psychodynamic colleagues see her nymphomania as a sign of her desperation to get pregnant. But obviously she’s been sterilized, like everyone else here. So if I were you, I’d wait awhile before opening the champagne.”

“What a sad story,” Daniel said.

He was secretly feeling very relieved. He remembered what Samantha had said about Corinne and the babies. So she had actually been telling him her own story.

“But can she really be diagnosed as a psychopath?” he added with a yawn. He was far too tired for a conversation like this.

“Of course not,” Doctor Fischer said with a snort. “This valley is a dumping ground for all sorts of detritus that no one wants on the outside. That’s the problem with our dual role as a research center and a secure enclave. As researchers, we want cases that are as clear-cut as possible. But in order to get funding we have to accept a fair number of patients who don’t belong here. We can’t afford to be too choosy, Daniel.”

He laughed, a hard, short laugh, and went on in a matter-of-fact tone. “To be honest, Samantha—like most of my female research colleagues—is here because of gender quotas, and not on merit. We have a large surplus of men in the valley, and an attractive woman with nymphomaniac tendencies solves a practical problem. As I’m sure you agree,” he added with a wink.

“Either way,” Daniel said, unwilling to be reminded of his own experience of Samantha’s nymphomania, “I don’t understand why you want to keep me here. I clearly haven’t fulfilled your expectations. You were wondering if I was a ‘concealed’ psychopath, and you’ve got your answer: I’m not. So now you can let me go home.”

Doctor Fischer rubbed his forehead anxiously.

“The problem is that I can’t do that. Not without revealing that I have consciously been detaining an innocent person here for two months. I’m sure you can see that I can’t do that. Then I’d have to resign as director of the clinic, and I’d lose all my research grants. I’m just going to have to keep you here as Max as long as I can.”