God's Spy (7 page)

Wednesday, 6 April 2005, 12.03 a.m.

Paola sat down, bracing herself to hear what Fowler had to say. ‘Ninety ninety-five was when it all began – for me, anyway. At
that time I’d retired from the Air Force and was working under the
direction of my bishop. He wanted to make use of my training in
psychology, so he sent me to the Saint Matthew Institute. Have any
of you heard of it?’
All three answered in the negative.
‘I’m not surprised. The very existence of the institution is a secret
to the majority of the public in North America, even the more
informed ones. It officially consists of a residential centre set up to
deal with priests and nuns who have “problems”, and it’s located
in Sachem Pike, Maryland. The reality is that ninety-five per cent
of its patients have a history of sexual abuse of minors or problems
with drugs. The institute’s facilities are, without question, luxurious:
thirty-five rooms for the patients, nine for the medical personnel
(nearly all interns), a tennis court, a pool, a recreation room with
billiard table . . .’
‘Sounds more like a health resort than a psychiatric institution,’
Pontiero interjected.
‘Well, the place is a mystery, in more ways than one. It is a mystery to the outside world and a mystery to those who stay there:
at first, they see it as a place they can retire to for several months,
somewhere they can rest; then, little by little, they discover that it
is altogether different. All of you know the enormous problem the
Church in my country has had with certain Catholic priests over the last few years. From the public’s point of view, it wouldn’t go down very well if they felt that priests accused of sexual abuse were getting
paid vacations in a luxury hotel.’
‘So were they?’ asked Pontiero, who seemed to be very affected
by the subject, perhaps on account of having two children himself,
both teenagers.
‘No. I’ll try to sum up my experiences there succinctly. Upon my
arrival I found it to be a profoundly secular place. It didn’t look
like a religious institution: no crucifixes on the wall, no one wearing habits or robes. I’ve spent many nights in the open air, on an
expedition or at the front, and I never took my clerical collar off.
But everyone there seemed to come and go as they pleased. Faith
and self-control were obviously in short supply.’
‘You didn’t communicate this to anyone?’ Dicanti asked. ‘Of course. The first thing I did was write a letter to the bishop
responsible for that parish. He accused me of being too influenced
by my time in the armed forces, by the “rigidity of the military environment”. He advised me to be more “adaptable”. Those were tricky
times for me; my career in the Air Force had been a roller-coaster
ride. I don’t want to get into that – it has nothing to do with the
case at hand – but let’s just say that I had no desire to add to my
reputation for being intransigent.’
‘You don’t have to justify yourself.’
‘I know, but what happened there does weigh on my conscience.
They cured neither minds nor souls in that institution; they simply
gave their patients a little push in the direction of least resistance.
What took place there was exactly the opposite of what the diocese
had hoped.’
‘I don’t follow,’ said Pontiero.
‘Nor do I,’ Troi chimed in.
‘It’s complicated. To begin with, the only psychiatrist with a university degree on staff at the centre was Father Conroy, at that time
the institute’s director. None of the other staff had a further degree
beyond nursing or a technical diploma. Yet they were allowed to
make psychiatric evaluations!’
‘Insane.’ Dicanti was amazed.
‘Completely. The only endorsement you had to have to get hired
was to belong to Dignity, an organisation that promotes the ordination of women and sexual freedom for male priests. Personally, I don’t agree with them about anything but it’s not my place to judge. What I could do was evaluate the professional capacity of the personnel, and that was extremely lacking.’
‘I don’t see where all this taking us,’ Pontiero said, lighting another cigarette.
‘Five more minutes and you will. As I was saying, Father Conroy, a great friend of Dignity and as liberal as they come, managed the Saint Matthew in a completely erratic manner. Honest priests arrived there, men confronted with baseless accusations (which did happen), and thanks to Conroy they relinquished the priesthood that had been the light of their lives. Others he urged not to struggle against their nature but to simply get on with life. He considered it a success when a religious person gave up their vows and began a homosexual relationship.’
‘And you see that as a problem?’ asked Dicanti.
‘No, not if the person really wanted or needed to do it. But the patient’s needs didn’t matter to Conroy in the slightest. First, he established his objectives and then he forged ahead, applying his plan to each person without any prior knowledge of them at all. He played God with the hearts and minds of those men and women, some of whom were deeply troubled. And then he washed it all down with a fine single malt.’
‘God in heaven!’ said Pontiero.
‘Take my word for it, He was nowhere on the premises. But that wasn’t the worst thing. Owing to several grave errors in the selection of candidates, many young men in my country who weren’t fit to be the shepherds of men’s souls had entered Catholic seminaries during the seventies and eighties. They weren’t even fit to take care of their own souls, let alone anyone else’s. With time, many of these young men gave up the cloth. They did a great deal of damage to the good name of the Catholic Church, and what’s worse, to many children and younger men. Many priests accused of sexual abuse – guilty of sexual abuse – didn’t go to jail. They disappeared from view and were moved from parish to parish. Some of them finally ended up at the Saint Matthew. There, and with a bit of luck, they were directed towards civilian life but, shamefully, many returned to the ministry when they should have been behind bars. Tell me, Dottoressa Dicanti, what chances are there for the rehabilitation of
a serial killer?’
‘Absolutely none at all. Once he crosses the line, there’s no way
to bring him back.’
‘It’s the same for a compulsive paedophile. Sadly, the certainty
you possess does not exist in our field. You know that you are dealing with a monster, someone who must be caught and caged. But it
is much more difficult for the therapist working with a paedophile
to know whether he has crossed the line for good. I know of only
one case when I never had the slightest doubt. And that was a case
where, beneath the paedophilia, there was something else.’ ‘Let me guess: Victor Karosky. Our killer.’
‘The same.’
Troi cleared his throat before interrupting. It was an irritating
habit that he repeated every so often. ‘Father Fowler, would you
kindly explain to us why you are so sure that this is the man who
has torn Robayra and Portini to pieces?’
‘Certainly. Karosky turned up at the institute in August 99. He
had been moved around various parishes, his superior shunting the
problem from one place to another. In every single one there were
complaints, some more serious than others, though none of an extremely violent nature. According to the testimony we collected, we
believe he abused eighty-nine children in all, although the number
could be higher.’
‘Fuck.’
‘You said it, Pontiero. But the root of Karosky’s problems is
located in his childhood. He was born in Katowice, Poland, in 96.
There—’
‘Hold on, padre. He’s forty-four years old now?’
‘That’s correct. He stands five foot eight and a half inches tall
and weighs one hundred and eighty-seven pounds. He has a strong
build, and testing revealed an IQ somewhere between 0 and ,
depending on when he took the test. He took seven in all at the
institute. He found them entertaining.’
‘That’s pretty high.’
‘You are a psychiatrist, while I studied psychology and wasn’t
an especially brilliant student. The most extreme psychopaths I
encountered were revealed to me too late to read up on the subject.
So tell me: is it true that serial killers are very intelligent?’ Paola smiled, half ironically, and glanced at Pontiero, who looked
at her with the same expression.
‘I think that the detective here can give you a good response to
that one.’
‘“Hannibal Lector doesn’t exist and Jodie Foster should stick to
costume dramas.” Dicanti says it all the time.’
Everyone laughed, not because the joke was particularly funny
but simply to release some of the tension in the air.
‘Thanks, Pontiero. Padre, the popular figure of the superpsychopath is a myth fashioned from novels and films. In real life,
people like that don’t exist. There have been serial killers with high
IQs and others with low IQs. The big difference between the two
is that the ones with the high IQs tend to carry out their crimes
over a longer period of time because they are more cautious. What
the academics all do agree on is the serial killer’s great talent for
killing.’
‘And those who aren’t academics?’
‘Outside academia, I’ve noticed that some of these bastards are
more clever than Satan himself. Not intelligent, but clever. And
there are some, a minority, who have a high IQ, an innate aptitude
for their despicable task and for dissimulation. And in one case and
one case only until now, these three characteristics have coincided
in a criminal who also was very cultured. I’m talking about Ted
Bundy.’
‘A well-known case in my country. He strangled and then sodomised something like thirty women with a tyre iron.’
‘Thirty-six – that we know about,’ Paola corrected him. She remembered the Bundy case in great detail, in as much as it had been
required reading in Quantico.
Fowler nodded sadly. ‘As I was saying, Victor Karosky came into
the world in 96 in Katowice, ironically just a few miles from where
Karel Wojtyla was born. In 969 the Karosky family, composed of
himself, his parents and two brothers, emigrated to the United States.
His father found work with General Motors in Detroit and, according to all the records, he was a good worker if somewhat difficult. In
97 there was a cutback owing to the gas crisis, and Karosky senior
was the first worker out the door. By then, the father had received his American citizenship, so he made himself comfortable in the tiny apartment he shared with his family, drinking away his severance pay and unemployment benefit. He really went at it – gave himself over to the task completely. He became another person, and he started to sexually abuse Victor and his older brother. The brother’s name was Beria. When he was fourteen years old, Beria
walked out of the house one day and never came back.’ ‘Karosky told you all this?’ Dicanti asked, intrigued and puzzled
at the same time.
‘Only after intense regression therapy. When he arrived at the
institute, his story was that he came from a model Catholic family.’ Paola, writing everything down in tiny script, rubbed her eyes.
She wanted to dislodge every speck of exhaustion before she started
talking.
‘What you’re telling us fits perfectly with the common registers
of first-level psychopaths: personal charm, absence of irrational
thinking, a lack of trustworthiness and of remorse, a great talent for
dissimulation. The blows from his father and the general consumption of alcohol by his parents have also been observed in more than
seventy-four per cent of known violent psychopaths.’
‘So it’s the probable cause?’ Fowler asked.
‘More likely, it’s one factor among many. I can cite thousands of
cases of people who were brought up in households much worse
than the one you’ve described, and they’ve reached a relatively
normal maturity, if such a thing actually exists.’
‘But we’ve barely scratched the surface. Karosky told us about the
death of his younger brother from meningitis in 97, and no one
seemed really to care about it. I was surprised by how cool Karosky
was when he related this particular episode. Two months after the
child died, his father mysteriously disappeared. Victor didn’t explain
whether he had something to do with the disappearance, although
we didn’t think so, since he would only have been thirteen years
old at the time. But we do know that it was about this time that he
began to torture small animals. The worst thing for him was that he
remained at the mercy of an overbearing mother, who was obsessed
with religion and even went so far as to dress him up as a girl so they
could “play together”. It seems she fondled him under his skirt, and
often told young Victor that she would cut his “little packages” so that his disguise would be complete. The result: Karosky still wet the bed at the age of fifteen. He wore cheap, unfashionable clothes because they were poor. He was teased at school and became very isolated . . . One time a friend made an unfortunate comment about Karosky’s attire as they passed in the corridor. Karosky, furious, repeatedly beat the other kid in the face with a heavy textbook. The kid wore glasses
and the lenses shattered into his eyes. He was left blind. ‘The eyes . . . Just like the cadavers. So that was his first violent
crime.’
‘As far as we know, yes. Victor was sent to a reformatory outside
Boston, and the last thing his mother said to him before waving
goodbye was, “I should have had an abortion.” A few months later
she committed suicide.’
The room went utterly silent. Words seemed indequate. ‘Karosky stayed at the reformatory until the end of 979. We don’t
have anything on that year, but in 980 he entered a seminary in
Baltimore. His application forms stated that his record was clean
and that he came from a traditional Catholic family. He was nineteen years old by then, and it seemed that he had been reformed. We
know almost nothing about his stay in the seminary, except that he
studied until he almost made himself ill, and that he was profoundly
sickened by the institution’s openly homosexual environment.
Conroy insisted that Karosky was a repressed homosexual who denied his true nature, but he was wrong. Karosky isn’t a homosexual
or a heterosexual. He doesn’t have a definite orientation. The fact
that sex isn’t an integral part of his personality is what, in my view,
has caused such grave damage to his psyche.’
‘Care to explain yourself?’ Pontiero asked.
‘I may as well. I am a priest who has made the decision to remain