The Lost Girls of Rome (31 page)

Marcus closed the French window, as if drawing a curtain over that spectacle. In the study, he immediately located the Braille display. Although there was no electricity, it was on. It was being fed by a generator.

It was a sign.

That afternoon, thanks to the voice program, he had listened to the contents of the anonymous email that Pietro Zini had received a few days earlier. But Marcus was sure that there had been more in that message and that Zini had switched it off before he had heard everything.

That was why, after locating the right key, Marcus again activated the device. The cold and impersonal electronic voice resumed those mysterious words that he was now in a position to decipher.

‘He-is-not-like-you … Look-in-Vil-la-Glo-ri-Park …’

That was the part he knew. But as he had foreseen, there was more.

‘ … The-boy-de-ceived-you … You-will-soon-have-a-vis-i-tor.’

This second fragment referred directly to Federico Noni and, indirectly, to Marcus, telling Zini in advance that he was coming.

But it was the last verse of this electronic dirge that most struck him.

‘It-hap-pened-be-fore … it-will-hap-pen-a-gain … c.g. 925-31-073.’

It was partly the prophecy it announced –
It happened before, it will happen again
– partly the code number referring to another unsolved crime –
925-31-073
– but above all it was the two letters that preceded the number.

Culpa gravis.

At last Marcus knew the truth.

There is a place where the world of light meets the world of darkness. It is there that everything happens: in the land of shadows, where everything is vague, confused, undefined. We are the guardians appointed to defend that border. But every now and again something manages to get through … I have to chase it back into the darkness.

Whoever was putting victims and murderers in contact with one another was a penitenziere like himself.

‘The great dream ended when we traded our integrity for a bit of consensus. We went to sleep with hope and we woke up with a whore whose name we couldn’t even remember.’

This was how Dr Norzhenko summarised Perestroika, the fall of the Berlin wall, the breakup of the republics, the rise of the oligarchs: in other words, twenty years of Soviet history.

‘Look at this …’ He stabbed his index finger at the front page of the
Kharkovskii Kurier
. ‘Everything’s going to pieces and what do they say? Nothing. So what was the point of freedom?’

Nikolai Norzhenko gave a sidelong glance at his visitor, who was nodding, apparently interested, even if not sharing as fully in this invective as he would have liked. Then he stared at the man’s bandaged hand. ‘Did you say you were American, Dr Foster?’

‘Actually I’m English,’ the hunter replied, trying to distract Norzhenko’s attention from the bandage. Beneath it was the bite he had received from young Angelina in the psychiatric hospital in Mexico City.

The office in which they were sitting was on the second floor of the administration building of the State Centre for Child Assistance, in the western part of Kiev. Through the large window there was a view of the grounds, the birch trees bright with the colours of early autumn. In the room, Formica predominated: everything was covered in it, from the desk to the walls. On one of the walls you could still see three lighter rectangular patches where portraits of Lenin, Stalin and whichever Secretary of the Communist Party was then in power must once have hung. The stale smell of cigarettes hung in the room: the ashtray in front of Norzhenko was filled with cigarette ends. Although he was probably only in his early fifties, his scruffy appearance and the unhealthy cough that punctuated his sentences made him seem much older. The man seemed to be seething with resentment and a sense of
humiliation. The empty photo frame on a side table and the folded blankets at the end of a leather sofa suggested a marriage that had ended unhappily. In Soviet days, he must have been a respected man. Now he was a sad parody of a State functionary, with the salary of a street cleaner.

Norzhenko picked up the sheet of paper with the fake references that the hunter had shown him on his arrival and looked at it again.

‘It says here that you’re the editor of a review of forensic psychology at the University of Cambridge. That’s remarkable at your age, Dr Foster, congratulations.’

The hunter had known these particulars would attract his attention. He wanted to appeal to Norzhenko’s wounded ego and he was succeeding.

Pleased, Norzhenko put the paper down. ‘You know, it’s strange. You’re the first person who’s ever come here to ask me about Dima.’

The hunter’s presence here was all down to Dr Florinda Valdez. Back in Mexico City, she had shown him an article Norzhenko had published in a minor review of psychology in 1989. It concerned the case of a child: Dmitry Karolyszin – Dima. Perhaps Norzhenko had hoped that the article would open doors for him, lead to a new career, at the very moment when everything around him was falling apart. But that hadn’t happened. The story had remained buried, along with his expectations and ambitions – until now.

It was time to bring it back to the surface.

‘Tell me, Dr Norzhenko, did you know Dima personally?’

‘Of course.’ Dr Norzhenko formed a pyramid with his hands and raised his eyes as if searching for a memory. ‘At first he seemed like any other boy; sharper, perhaps, but very quiet.’

‘What year was that?’

‘The spring of 1986. At the time, this centre was at the forefront of childcare in the Ukraine, perhaps in the whole Soviet Union.’ Norzhenko’s tone as he said this was full of self-satisfaction. ‘Unlike orphanages in the West, we didn’t just take care of children who had nobody in the world, we prepared them for the future.’

‘Everyone knew your methods. You were an example.’

Norzhenko was happy to accept the flattery. ‘After the disaster at
Chernobyl, the authorities in Kiev asked us to take care of the children who had lost their parents through radiation sickness. It was thought likely that they, too, would develop symptoms. Our task was to care for them until relatives could be found who might be able to take them in.’

‘Did Dima arrive with these children?’

‘Six months after the disaster, if I remember rightly. He was from Prypiat. The city was in the exclusion zone around the reactor and had been evacuated. He was eight years old.’

‘Was he with you for a long time?’

‘Twenty-one months.’ Norzhenko paused, frowning, then stood up and went to a filing cabinet. After a brief search, he came back to the desk with a file in a beige cover. He started leafing through it. ‘Like all the children from Prypiat, Dmitry Karolyszin suffered from bed wetting and mood swings, common results of shock and forced separation. His case was followed by a team of psychologists. During the interviews, he told us about his family: his mother Anya, a housewife, and his father Konstantin, who had worked as a technician at the Chernobyl plant. He described details of their life together … details that would turn out to be accurate.’ He emphasised these last words.

‘What happened?’

Before answering, Norzhenko took a cigarette from the packet he had in the breast pocket of his shirt and lit it.

‘Dima had only one relative still living, a brother of his father: Oleg Karolyszin. After a long search, we managed to track him down in Canada. He was perfectly happy to be given the chance to take care of his nephew. He only knew Dima from the photographs Konstantin used to send him. So when we sent him a recent image so that he could confirm the boy’s identity, we had no idea of what would come next. It was little more than a formality.’

‘Instead of which, Oleg told you the child wasn’t his nephew.’

‘Precisely … and yet even though Dima had never met him, he knew many things about his uncle, even anecdotes about his childhood that his father had told him. He remembered the presents he sent him every year for his birthday.’

‘So what did you think?’

‘At first, that Oleg had changed his mind and no longer wanted to take care of Dima. But when he sent us some of the photographs of the child that his brother had sent him over the years, we were astonished … We were dealing with a completely different person.’

For a few moments, there was an awkward silence in the room. Norzhenko studied the hunter’s face as if to see whether he considered him mad.

‘You hadn’t realised this before?’

‘There were no pictures of Dima prior to his arrival at the centre. The population of Prypiat had been forced to abandon their houses in a hurry, taking with them only what was strictly necessary. The child arrived here with nothing but the clothes he was wearing.’

‘What happened next?’

Norzhenko took a deep drag on his cigarette. ‘There was only one explanation: the child, whoever he was, had taken the place of the real Dima. But there was more … it wasn’t simply a case of assumed identity.’

The hunter’s eyes gleamed, and at the same time there was a flash of something in Norzhenko’s eyes, too. Almost certainly fear.

‘The two children were not simply similar,’ Norzhenko went on. ‘The real Dima was short-sighted, so was this boy. Both were lactose intolerant. Oleg told us that his nephew had no hearing in his right ear because of an inflammation that had been badly treated. We subjected our Dima to audiometric tests, without telling him why. He turned out to have exactly the same defect.’

‘He could have been pretending. Audiometric tests rely on the answers provided by the patient. Maybe your Dima knew that.’

‘Maybe …’ The rest of the sentence died on Norzhenko’s lips. ‘A month after our discovery, the boy disappeared.’

‘Had he run away?’

‘Not so much run away as … vanished.’ Norzhenko’s face turned sombre. ‘We looked for him for weeks, with the help of the police.’

‘And the real Dima?’

‘No trace of him, or of his parents: we only knew they were dead because our Dima had told us. These were chaotic times, and it was
impossible to check the facts. Everything connected with Chernobyl was kept under wraps, even the most trivial information.’

‘Immediately after that, you wrote your article.’

‘But nobody took any notice.’ Norzhenko shook his head bitterly and looked away, almost as if ashamed of himself. But then he regained his composure and looked straight at the hunter. ‘The boy wasn’t simply trying to pass himself off as someone else, believe me. At that age, the brain isn’t capable of structuring such an elaborate lie. No, in his mind he really was Dima.’

‘When he disappeared, did he take anything with him?’

‘No, but he left something behind …’

Norzhenko leaned down and opened one of the desk drawers. After searching for a moment, he extracted a little toy and placed it on the table in front of his visitor.

A stuffed rabbit.

It was blue, dirty and tattered. Someone had mended its tail and it lacked an eye. It had a smile that was both blissful and sinister.

The hunter looked at it. ‘It doesn’t seem like much of a clue.’

‘I agree with you, Dr Foster,’ Norzhenko admitted, his eyes lighting up as if he had something else in reserve. ‘But you don’t know where we found it.’

It was getting dark. Norzhenko led his supposed colleague across a corner of the grounds and into another building belonging to the centre.

‘This used to be the main dormitory.’

They did not head for the upper floors, but down to the basement. Norzhenko activated a series of switches and the fluorescent lights came on, illuminating a vast area. The walls were dark with damp. Pipes of every size ran across the ceiling, many of them in poor repair.

‘One of the cleaners made the discovery some time after the boy disappeared.’ He went no further, almost as if he wanted to enjoy his younger colleague’s surprise once they got there. ‘I’ve tried to keep this place exactly as we found it. Don’t ask me why, I simply
thought that one day it would help us to understand. And besides, nobody ever comes down here.’

They walked along a narrow, high-ceilinged corridor lined with steel doors through which the noise of the boilers could dimly be heard. Then they came to a second room, used as a store room for old furniture: beds and rotting mattresses. Norzhenko made his way through it and invited his colleague to do the same.

‘We’re almost there,’ he announced.

They turned a corner and found themselves in a narrow badly ventilated box room under the stairs. It was dark, but Norzhenko managed to illuminate the place with his cigarette lighter.

In the amber light of that little flame, his visitor took a step forward, incredulous at what he was seeing.

It resembled a gigantic insect’s nest.

The hunter’s first reaction was one of disgust, but then, as he went closer, he saw that it consisted of many small pieces of wood, held together with scraps of material of various colours, ropes, clothes pegs, drawing pins, and bits of papier mâché. Everything had been assembled with great care and meticulousness.

It was a child’s makeshift refuge.

He had built similar things himself when he was small. But this one was different.

‘The rabbit was in there,’ Norzhenko said, and watched as his visitor leaned into the narrow opening and touched the floor. He looked over his shoulder and saw him examining a ring of small dark stains.

For the hunter, it was a startling revelation.

Dried blood. He had seen the same thing in Paris, in Jean Duez’s apartment.

The false Dima was the transformist.

But he mustn’t appear too excited. ‘Do you have any idea where these stains come from?’ he asked.

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Do you mind if I take a sample?’

‘Go ahead.’

‘And I’d also like the stuffed rabbit, it may be linked to the false Dima’s past.’

Norzhenko hesitated. He was trying to figure out whether his colleague was really interested in the story. This might be the last chance he would get to redeem his own existence.

‘In my opinion, the case still has scientific value,’ the hunter said, to convince him. ‘It’s worthy of further study.’