The Angel Maker (15 page)

Just a short while later the two men set off for the three-border junction in the watchman’s old Simca. The car was making horrible noises.

‘There’s a hole in the exhaust,’ remarked the mechanic immediately.

‘I know,’ replied Reisiger, shouting over the din. ‘I’ve ordered a new car, but it won’t be delivered until next week.’

He drove the car under the bridge in second gear. As he started up the Route des Trois Bornes, he asked the mechanic what Charlotte Maenhout had been doing so early in the morning at the three borders.

‘No idea,’ he replied. ‘I asked her, but she didn’t give me an answer. All she said was that she had to get back to the village, and soon.’

‘She’ll just have to be patient,’ said Reisiger, switching into first gear because the old Simca could barely make it up the hill.

When they caught sight of the tower through the windscreen, Glück pointed up at the sky. ‘There’s the boy. Do you see him?’

The watchman nodded, pressing his nose flat against the windscreen.

The boy was hunkered down into a ball and seemed to have some sort of cloth draped over him. His arms were wrapped around one of the vertical banisters.

Frau Maenhout was standing by the gate, her face almost as white as the shawl around her shoulders. She was holding a child by each hand. The watchman couldn’t tell if the children were bald because of their hats, but he did catch a glimpse of a scar through one of the masks’ mouth holes.

As Otto Reisiger unlocked the gate, Glück the mechanic stared at the strapping woman. Her legs were shaking.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Frau Maenhout muttered several times. She was making a visible effort to fight back tears. But in spite of that, there was something hard about her. With a black habit on, she could easily have been taken for a nun, he decided.

‘Wait here,’ said Reisiger. He strode through the gate to the foot of the tower, but Frau Maenhout followed him at once.

‘I’m coming with you,’ she said, ‘or he’ll never come down.’

The watchman shrugged. Grabbing the handrail, he began to mount the stairs, with Frau Maenhout right behind him.

‘Too bad this had to happen,’ he said without looking back. ‘The tower’s going to be demolished soon. They’re building another one in its place.’

Frau Maenhout did not respond.

‘It’ll be fifty metres high,’ he said proudly, ‘and it’ll have a lift!’

His words did not appear to be getting through to her. She could think of nothing but the boy, he realised; it was only natural. They had to be the doctor’s sons - he was sure of it. He glanced down over his shoulder. The other two children were following his every move, their heads tipped back. He had seen the triplets once, when he had felt a sudden searing pain in his chest and had urgently rung Dr Hoppe’s doorbell. The boys had been sitting at the doctor’s desk in the office and they’d looked at him curiously. He had returned their stare. Afterwards he had invited the doctor to visit the three borders some time with the boys, but the doctor had never taken him up on the offer, at least until now.

Once they were at the top, the watchman saw that the boy’s arms were tightly clasped around the banisters. Leaning down, he reached for the skinny arms, but the child began to yell, ‘Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!’

The shrill voice cut the air like a knife. Startled, Otto Reisiger took a step back, bumping into Frau Maenhout. As he made a grab for the railing, his free hand accidentally struck the child’s hat, pushing it askew. What he saw then removed any doubt: a big bald skull with a network of inky veins.

‘See now, it is one of the doctor’s brats! I just knew it!’ he exclaimed.

Frau Maenhout quickly looked the other way, turning to the boy. ‘Let me try,’ she said. She bent down and began talking to him in a soothing voice.

The watchman heard her say the name Michael a couple of times.

From down below, Felix Glück saw Frau Maenhout finally picking up the boy in her arms. She made an attempt to put the hat back on his head, but he slapped her hand away, yelling, ‘No, no, I’m not a musketeer any more!’ With his other hand, he pulled the mask off his face.

As if they’d been given a sign, his brothers both decided to follow his example. With a swift flourish they tipped the hats from their heads and ripped off their masks.

The mechanic caught himself staring, open-mouthed.

‘They had the bodies of toddlers, but the faces of old men,’ he later told his clients in the garage. ‘They were sick. Very sick. That was as clear as day.’

When Frau Maenhout reached the bottom, Glück tried to see if the boy in her arms looked the same as the other two, but he kept his face buried in the woman’s ample bosom.

‘Look what I’ve found!’ came the watchman’s voice. He was standing at the gate, red-faced, waving a sword that was broken in two pieces. He laid the fragments of wood across each other and said, smiling, ‘A couple of nails and some wood glue will soon fix that! Then you can play with it again!’

But the boys acted as if they hadn’t heard him.

Reisiger shrugged his shoulders, tucked the smashed sword under his arm and locked the gate. ‘Shall I take you back to the doctor’s house, Frau Maenhout?’ he asked.

She had been staring blankly into the distance, and it took her a while to turn her gaze towards him. She shook her head. ‘No, no, it’s not necessary, really.’

‘But I insist, Frau Maenhout,’ the watchman pressed her. ‘The doctor would never forgive me if I left you here. And the boys would probably much rather go home by car than on foot - am I right?’

Again there was no response. Felix Glück stared at the boys. Little Martians, he thought - they look just like little Martians, only they aren’t green. He heard the woman take some deep breaths. Then she assented.

Reisiger nodded. ‘That’s a wise decision, Frau Maenhout.’ He walked to his car, opened the hatch and dropped the broken sword into the boot.

Meanwhile Glück the mechanic had gone to open the rear door. ‘Please, why don’t you take a seat in the back with the children, madam? That would be best, I think.’

She stepped past him and looked him briefly in the eye. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thanks very much.’

Her eyes were soft. Suddenly she seemed much nicer than before.

The woman scooted into the back seat with the boys, and the watchman got in too. The car listed a bit to the side he was on.

‘Herr Glück, thanks and see you around!’ he cried, sticking his hand out the window.

‘See you around!’ said Glück, but his voice was lost in the car’s deafening roar.

Five minutes later a group of people on the pavement in front of the Café Terminus watched as the car drove into the village.

‘There’s my husband,’ exclaimed Frau Reisiger, waving at him.

From a distance he stuck his arm out the window and gave the thumbs-up.

‘My God, all’s well then,’ she said, relieved.

The car rolled slowly past the onlookers. Otto Reisiger gestured that he would drop his passengers off at the doctor’s house. But the villagers only had eyes for whoever was in the backseat.

Someone said, ‘I told you so,’ and that set the tone as the rest of the chorus joined in.

11

She had made a complete hash of it. That was the conclusion Frau Maenhout reached in Otto Reisiger’s car. Not only had she got herself into a fine pickle, she had also disappointed the boys terribly. They didn’t say a word, not even once they were home again. They were shattered, and she immediately put them to bed. Then she sat down at the kitchen table, and gave in to the emotions she had kept bottled up all this time. She could barely think straight. The one thing racing through her head was the question: how she could have been so stupid?

It was an hour before she was able to calm herself down, and the first thing she then asked herself was what to do next. She had boxed herself into a corner. How could she possibly accuse Dr Hoppe of neglect or abuse when she had shown such a lack of responsibility? The doctor would seize the opportunity to heap all the blame on her. It was more urgent than ever, therefore, to find some evidence that would prove the doctor’s malevolent intent. Only then would she be able to take the next step.

So she began to search for evidence. She might have all day to do so, but then again, she might not. She had no idea where to look or what, exactly, she was looking for.

She began in the office. She had expected everything to be under lock and key, but that wasn’t the case. When she opened one of the drawers, the patient files fanned out like an accordion. She limited herself to flipping through the Hs, however - she didn’t want to be accused of anything more was than strictly necessary. If her search didn’t turn up anything in the end, she would go through the rest of the files. Alas, the letter ‘H’ did not give her anything to go on.

In the other drawers she found nothing but medical implements - scissors, needles, bandages, cotton wool, rubber gloves. Gloves! It suddenly occurred to her that she had been leaving her fingerprints all over the place. It made her feel even more like an intruder. But she was doing it for a reason! - a triple reason, asleep upstairs. That gave her the courage to pursue her search. And that was how she came to discover something after all.

There was a pile of photo albums in one of the cabinets. Maybe she would find photos that would shed some light on the doctor’s past? Photographs of the doctor as a child or teenager, photos of his mother, or his father, who had also been a GP; perhaps even a picture of his wife, the mother of Michael, Gabriel and Raphael! Who was she? What was she like? Charlotte had often wondered about her, especially since the boys were bound to start asking about her some day. Yet she knew very little. In all the years that she had been working there the doctor had only mentioned her once. Charlotte had questioned the doctor and he had replied that he knew very little about the boys’ mother. That was all, but it had made Frau Maenhout wonder, naturally. Perhaps, she had thought to herself, perhaps Michael, Gabriel and Raphael’s mother wasn’t dead. Perhaps she and the doctor had never been married; perhaps the boys were the product of some sort of fling. At the time she had discussed the possibility with Hannah Kuijk, who had gone one further. ‘Or a rape!’ Hannah had suggested. Some hanky-panky between the doctor and one of his patients, perhaps. That would also explain, Hannah said, why he had been willing to trade a city like Bonn for a village like Wolfheim. The woman had lodged a complaint against him; his name had been dragged through the mud. And she’d probably not wanted to keep the babies, because they were so - ‘Forgive me for saying it,’ Hannah had said - ugly. So to the doctor the boys were a reminder of his disgrace, and that was the reason why he could not love them the way a father should.

Frau Maenhout couldn’t help remembering that conversation as she stood at the consultation-room cabinet leafing through the photo albums, quite unprepared for what she was looking at. She had truly imagined something different.

It took her a while to understand. She had taken down the first album. It was marked ‘V1’ in the upper right-hand corner. She had no idea what that might mean. It was full of Polaroid pictures, probably taken by the doctor himself. Underneath each photo, in the white margin, was a caption written in felt-tip pen - another ‘V1’, followed by the date and the year; in this case 1984. The photos themselves were peculiar: just a hand, a leg, a foot, an ear or a navel. Opening the book at random, she saw that it was like that throughout. Then she went back to the beginning. The first page.

She recognised the baby immediately. In the first photo he was lying on his back, naked, on a bed or sofa, she couldn’t tell which. She didn’t know which of the three it was, there was no name, but there was a date: ‘29/09/1984’. The children’s birthday. What struck her next was the cleft palate. Not the scar, because that didn’t exist yet. This was something else. A wound. A gaping hole.

That it was definitely a gaping hole was confirmed on the next page. It gave her quite a turn. The doctor had photographed the cleft palate the same way that he had photographed the hands and feet and other body parts - close up.

She gasped, and snapped the album shut, but the picture stayed branded in her mind.

Then she took out the next album. ‘V2’ she read on the cover. Opening it at random, she realised at once that all the pictures were identical to the ones in the first album. Yet still she proceeded to take the third album down from the shelf, if only to find what she had expected on the cover: ‘V3’. And that album, too, was the same: hands, feet, legs. But also the torso, the back of the head, the shoulders, the eyes . . . everything.

Everything.

She had to sit down on a chair by the desk. She felt dizzy.

A little later she started counting the albums from where she was sitting. She counted twelve. A simple sum. One album a year for each child.

 

It wasn’t enough. What did it prove? Nothing. She came to that conclusion over the course of the morning. After her discovery she stopped searching and went up to the boys’ bedroom. They were still asleep. She didn’t stay upstairs long, as she couldn’t think in their presence. Gazing at them, she kept seeing those pictures flash before her eyes.

Downstairs she walked towards the phone to call Hannah. But she kept procrastinating. She felt she had to make sense of it herself, first. But in the end she did dial the number.

No one picked up.

She made herself a cup of soup to force herself to think of something else. She did the washing-up. The ironing. Every so often she felt as if she couldn’t breathe. What could she do? What should she do? She was distraught.

In the end she returned to the office. There had to be more. This time her gaze was immediately drawn to the door leading to the laboratory. That was where he always kept his children in isolation when they were sick. That door wasn’t locked either, which was a bit of a let-down, because it meant there was less chance he was keeping something hidden in there.