The Angel Maker (16 page)

She had not been in the laboratory very often. He cleaned this room himself, and the few times she had been inside she had seen that he did an extremely thorough job. No dust, no mess, no clutter.

It struck her again how clean the room was. No dust, no mess, no clutter. Yet it was different this time. All the glasses, all the jars, all the dishes - every piece of equipment, including the microscopes and monitors - looked pristine, as if they’d never been used. Each time she had peeked in here before, there had always been something bubbling or steaming somewhere; the tables or cabinets had held all kinds of Petri dishes or liquid-filled test tubes. But not this time. It was as if the room had recently been refurbished and was awaiting a new occupant. That was her first impression. But soon she arrived at a different conclusion: he’s covering up his tracks. He’s cleared everything away, thrown it out, destroyed the evidence.

She was too late. That, sadly, was the conclusion she had to draw.

She decided to look through the patient records once more, but first she returned to the cabinet with the photo albums. Overcoming her repugnance, she began leafing through all twelve albums, beginning to end, though in a cursory way. And even though she knew what she would see there, she kept having to swallow. She had hoped she might find a photo or a note stuck between the pages, something that would help her, but there was nothing. As she turned the last page, she had the sense that she was also closing the final chapter in the boys’ lives.

At that point she gave up. She didn’t have the strength or the courage to probe any further. She wanted to spend the time that remained with Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. Once the doctor was home again, she’d see what would happen. She’d just wait and see.

As she was returning the last album to the cabinet, her gaze landed on a pile of magazines lying on another shelf. They were all English-language journals with titles such as Nature, Cell, Differentiation. She picked up a few and flapped them around to see if anything fell out. But this final effort - she knew it was hopeless - also produced nothing. Until she started putting the magazines back on the shelf. As she was doing so, the portrait of a man caught her eye. It was on the cover of one of the issues of Differentiation. She recognised him immediately, from the red hair and the moustache camouflaging his scar. He didn’t have a beard yet. Under the photo was a caption and one word immediately caught her attention: ‘experimental’. She looked up the article. He had written it himself. It said ‘Dr Victor Hoppe’ above the title: ‘Experimental Genetics of the Mammalian Embryo’.

‘Mammalian,’ she said out loud; it made her think of the French word mammalien. From a mammal, then. ‘Genetic experiments with mammalian embryos’. She shuddered involuntarily and glanced at the date on the cover. The issue was dated March 1982.

With growing astonishment she began to look through the other journals. Each had some mention of the doctor’s name, and sometimes his photo. It was always the same photo: a simple passport picture. Some of the articles were written by the doctor himself, but most, it turned out, were about him. He was described as a ‘famous embryologist’ at the University of Aachen, where he had apparently done some remarkable experiments in the early eighties. The authors were all in awe of the doctor; many of them even applauded him. But then, suddenly, the tone of the articles began to change, as evidenced by the words that were used: ‘investigation’, ‘falsification’, ‘fraud’, ‘chaos’. Those words shocked her. Especially the last two.

Finally, in the magazine at the very bottom of the pile, an issue of Nature, she found one last article about him. It was short, but the title alone spoke volumes: ‘University of Aachen: Victor Hoppe resigns’.

She felt another shudder running up her spine, and when she looked at the date of the journal, she gasped: 3 July 1984. Three months before the doctor had returned to Wolfheim.

On an impulse, she tore out the article.

 

Fraud and chaos. Chaos and fraud. She repeated the words to herself because she was trying to make some sense of them. The word ‘fraud’, in particular, set her thinking; indeed, it even gave her comfort. After all, it meant that the doctor had already deceived people in some fashion or other; that he had convinced people of things that were untrue. That was something she could use.

Suddenly some other words came back to her. How had he put it again? It was when she’d brought up the subject of the incision on Gabriel’s back. She had said, ‘I don’t believe you,’ or, ‘I don’t believe you any more.’

Have you, too, lost faith in me?

You, too. So she wasn’t the only one.

She had a lead. That was all it was. But it was more than she had expected. She could look into this further. She would get someone to translate the article for her, contact the University of Aachen. But she wouldn’t rush it. She mustn’t make any mistakes. That night, when she got home, she would make a start. And then she’d have all of Sunday. She wouldn’t have to defend her actions until Monday morning, when, she supposed, the first patients would inform the doctor about what had happened at the three borders. But by that time she hoped to have made some headway. And even if she hadn’t, there was still time. All in all, she no longer cared if the doctor fired her.

 

Dr Hoppe came home that Saturday at half past five. Frau Maenhout was in the classroom with Michael, Gabriel and Raphael. After the boys had woken up at around two o’clock and had had something to eat, she’d taken them upstairs, but there hadn’t been a lesson. The boys were distracted, and she too had been unable to concentrate. She had read to them, however. The story she picked from the children’s Bible was that of David and Goliath. About how a simple shepherd slew a giant.

‘If you aren’t big and strong, you have to be cunning,’ she told them when she came to the end of the story. Then she told them to make a drawing of it.

‘Just how big was the giant exactly?’ Gabriel wanted to know.

‘Three metres tall. Even taller than this.’ She stretched her arm up in the air, as high as she could reach.

‘He won’t fit on my page.’

‘You have to draw it to scale. You have to make everything smaller than it is in the real world.’

That was a difficult concept for them to understand. They didn’t know how to turn something that was life-sized and real in their heads into something reduced and two-dimensional. For some reason she couldn’t make them see it; they could only envisage what was real.

She drew a picture of David and next to him a giant four times his size.

‘But that isn’t a giant. He’s much too small!’ Gabriel yelled.

‘All right, but just go ahead and copy it.’

She realised that she was a bit short on patience that afternoon. She was nervous, of course. She kept glancing at her watch. She bit her nails. She opened the window a crack and held her breath every time a car drove past.

At around five o’clock she couldn’t keep it inside her any longer. She made the triplets pay attention, and started asking them questions. She wanted to prepare them. She didn’t say, ‘In case someone asks you . . .’ She simply posed the question: ‘What do you think of your father?’

‘He’s bad.’

‘Why?’

‘He does bad things.’

‘What kind of things?’

‘With needles. He sticks needles into us. Long needles . . .’

‘Is that all?’

After thinking it over for a while, they couldn’t come up with anything else. Which made her realise that there had been nothing else. Of whatever she thought the doctor guilty, very little could be proven. What it boiled down to in the end was that he had acted irresponsibly towards his children. Inhumanely, even. But he had never blown up at them. He had never hit them. All that he had done, in fact, was subject them to medical examinations, even if excessively so. He had kept them indoors. But was that a crime?

She gave a deep sigh and tried to compose her thoughts. Fraud and chaos. That was what she should be concentrating on.

When, at 5.30, the taxi stopped in front of the house, she walked over to the window, her heart beating loudly in her chest. The doctor got out and instinctively she stepped back so that he wouldn’t see her.

‘Your father is home,’ she said to the children. ‘You’d better tidy up. He’ll be up in a minute.’

But he did not come upstairs.

She waited five minutes. Ten minutes. She heard him down in the office. She fervently hoped that he wouldn’t discover she’d been snooping. She tried to remember if she had put everything back the way she’d found it.

Why wasn’t he coming upstairs to check if everything was all right?

She decided to go downstairs herself, with the boys, and then leave. She walked over to the window to shut it, but a sound from outside caught her attention. She looked up. The sky was quite blue, aside from a few high wisps of cloud, yet it sounded as if a thunderstorm were approaching from some distance. She opened the window a little wider and leaned out. The rumbling came from the other end of Napoleonstrasse and was getting louder. She had heard the sound before, but at first was unable to place it. It sounded like a large convoy of automobiles. But that wasn’t it.

Suddenly she knew what it was and grew pale as a sheet. When she turned round, she could tell from the way Michael, Gabriel and Raphael cocked their heads that they too had recognised the sound.

‘The car,’ said Gabriel. ‘That’s the car of that mister.’ His voice could barely be heard over the sound of the car, which was now very close.

Frau Maenhout didn’t say anything, but listened intently. She glanced at her watch. It was almost 5.45. Otto Reisiger was probably returning from the three borders, where he had kept the Boudewijn Tower open until five o’clock. He’s on his way to Albertstrasse, she thought; he won’t stop.

But he did stop. The deafening noise of the damaged exhaust continued for a few more seconds, then suddenly it went quiet. Frau Maenhout swallowed and looked out of the window. The watchman had parked his Simca in front of the house. He leaned across the passenger seat to pick something up, then got out and slammed the door shut. In his hand he held the little wooden sword, which, by the looks of it, he had repaired. Frau Maenhout, slapping her hands to her mouth, saw him ring the bell. He pushed open the gate, which wasn’t latched, and walked up the path.

She turned and looked at the children. ‘Have we said our prayers yet today?’ She just blurted it out. She didn’t know why. Well, she did, but she refused to acknowledge it. She was afraid.

She walked up to the three school desks where the three brothers sat. They had folded their hands together obediently. From downstairs in the hall came the sound of voices.

‘Our Father . . .’ she began.

‘The sign of the cross,’ Raphael interrupted her, ‘first we have to cross ourselves.’

‘You’re right,’ she said, and raised her right hand to her forehead.

‘In the name of the Father . . .’

Half-whispering, the boys said the prayer after her, the way she had taught them to. She closed her eyes and listened to the boys’ sing-song voices.

‘Our Father who art in heaven . . .’

She wouldn’t take it lying down. She was determined not to. She would defend herself. She would say that it was his fault. Wasn’t it?

‘Forgive us our trespasses . . .’

‘Thank you, Herr Reisiger!’ came the doctor’s voice. ‘Goodbye!’

The children calmly continued their prayer.

‘Lead us not into temptation . . .’

Downstairs the front door slammed shut.

‘. . . but deliver us from evil. Amen.’

Then she heard the doctor ascending the stairs. She hastily decided to go and meet him halfway. She didn’t want a scene in the children’s presence.

‘I’ll be back in a jiff!’ she told them. She walked to the door. The stress manifested itself in her hands, which she couldn’t keep still. Outside Herr Reisiger’s car started making its noise again. Not a loud grumbling or rumbling this time, but a high-pitched screech that lasted just a few seconds. She opened the door and stepped out onto the landing.

The doctor had just arrived at the top of the stairs. He was holding the wooden sword. She glanced at his face to weigh his mood, but his features, as usual, betrayed no expression.

‘Herr Reisiger,’ he began.

The deafening racket of the car outside suddenly returned. The doctor paused, then began again, ‘Herr Reisiger returned the sword. He told me—’

‘It’s all your fault,’ she broke in. She was wringing her hands together convulsively. She would remain on the attack.

‘What?’

He’s just pretending, she thought. He’s trying to play innocent.

‘It’s your fault that it has come to this,’ she said.

He bowed his head.

‘That isn’t true,’ he said. ‘It isn’t my fault.’

‘Excuse me?’ she said, startled and furious at the same time.

He started to shake his head but his eyes remained fixed on the floor. ‘I’ve done good. I have only done good. I didn’t want this to happen.’

He’s talking gibberish, she thought; it’s almost as if he’s drunk. He kept wobbling his head strangely from side to side. Outside the car began shrieking again, but the doctor’s voice carried over it.

‘He wanted it this way. He’s the one. I tried to stop him. I did try. But . . .’ He ran his hand over the sword’s wooden blade and took a step forward, but appeared to stagger.

‘I wanted to do good. I have always wanted to do good.’

Chaos and fraud. The words sprang to her mind again, and she said them out loud: ‘Chaos and fraud!’ She sidestepped to get away from him. ‘Chaos and fraud. That’s what they accused you of. You tricked everyone. Before. And now.’

Just then there was a loud bang outside. It made her jump, but the noise did not seem to register with the doctor.