The Devil's Sanctuary (22 page)

IT WAS
early in the morning, and the little square was still shaded by the mountain. The bell on the door to the bakery kept ringing as people emerged with fresh loaves, and on one balcony a man in an undershirt was watering his window boxes. There was nothing to suggest that the village was anything but a perfectly normal village, with well-kept houses and industrious inhabitants going about their business.

Corinne was sitting on the side of the well, wearing a jacket with the hood pulled up. As soon as their eyes met she gestured almost imperceptibly with her head and started to walk off. Daniel followed her through the narrow village streets, then up a flight of steps on the side of a building. They stepped through a door just under the ridge of the roof into a dark, narrow hall, leading to another door with a coded lock.

“Your door’s more secure than mine,” Daniel said.

“That’s because I’m a woman.”

She let him into a large, gloomy attic space with walls and ceiling of rough wood, with just a few tiny windows.

“Well, this is where I live,” Corinne said as she went round turning on the lights, mainly table lamps and small strings of Christmas lights.

It was certainly an unusual home. The walls were adorned with fantastical masks, puppets, and posters for theater performances. The bed was covered with an Indian throw and, like an island in the middle of the room, there was a group of red-velour armchairs. A third of the space had been transformed into a gym, with weights and equipment and a large mirror on the wall.

Daniel stopped and looked at the masks.

“My former life,” Corinne explained. “And my current one.”

She gestured toward the gym part of the room.

“Okay,” she went on before Daniel had time to ask any questions. “So you’ve realized that you need to get in shape. Let’s start by warming up.”

She pulled off her jacket and threw it aside. Under it she was wearing a red tank top. She went over to the equipment, took out a jump rope, and slowly began to skip.

“You can have the bike.”

Daniel walked in a curve around the flailing rope and sat down on an exercise bike. He put in some serious effort to get it going. Some years ago he had done plenty of exercise, jogging and going to the gym, but his depression had broken the habit and he had never gotten back into it again.

“What have you been up to since we last met?” Corinne asked.

“I’ve been writing some letters,” he panted. “Can you send letters from here?”

“Sure. You hand them in at reception in an unsealed envelope. Before anything is sent, it gets read by the clinic staff to assess its suitability.”

“Suitability?”

“Obviously letters mustn’t contain threats or anything else unpleasant. And you’re not allowed to say too much about Himmelstal. Officially it’s a ‘special psychiatric clinic,’ nothing more specific than that, and we’re expected to maintain that image.”

Corinne did a few extra-high jumps, spinning the rope twice while she was in the air, then resumed a gentler tempo.

“And you’re not allowed to write to anyone you like. The addressee has to be checked and accepted first. Who have you written to?”

“The population registry and passport authority in Sweden,” Daniel panted. “The Swedish embassy in Bern. I want to have my identity confirmed. I don’t have the exact addresses, but I was hoping someone could help me with that.”

Corinne broke off her skipping and laughed out loud.

“Those letters will never get out of Himmelstal.”

“What about incoming mail?” Daniel asked. “Is that censored as well?”

“Yes. Everything gets read. And the sender is checked out.”

“That’s odd,” Daniel said.

He had stopped pedaling and was sitting still on the bike.

“How do you mean?”

“Max received a letter before I got here. The contents were distinctly threatening.”

He told her what had been in Max’s letter from the Mafia.

“Did you see it?” Corinne said.

“No. But I did see the photograph they sent. Of a woman they’d beaten up.”

“That letter didn’t come in through official channels, that much is obvious.”

“How would it have gotten here, then?”

“How should I know? But a lot of things come into Himmelstal that shouldn’t be here,” Corinne said.

She hung the jump rope up on the wall.

“Drugs?” Daniel asked.

“Has anyone offered to sell you some?”

“A guy in the cafeteria implied as much. And I’ve seen people who’ve seemed to be under the influence.”

“Samantha?”

They certainly keep an eye on each other, Daniel thought. Who had seen Samantha at his cabin? Only the hostesses. Who might have told Gisela Obermann. Who might then have told Corinne during a therapy session.

“I thought it was the evening patrol,” he said by way of excuse. “She was high as a kite. I got rid of her at once.”

Corinne seemed satisfied.

“There are drugs in the valley,” she admitted as she wrapped her hand with a long strip of black cotton. “Not much though. Enough to satisfy demand, but little enough to keep prices high. I’d estimate that the amount available is exactly calculated for the number of users in a population of this size to keep maybe two or three dealers in a life of luxury.”

“Who are they? The guy in the denim vest?”

“He’s a small-time dealer. But if you head west in the valley you’ll find a couple of really nice houses up on the right. The people living there don’t have very special jobs. They must have other sources of income.”

“So who lives there?”

“Kowalski lives in the villa at the top of the slope. Sørensen lives in the one lower down.”

Kowalski and Sørensen were the men who usually played cards by the pool.

“But how do they get the stuff in?”

“Good question. Everything coming in gets thoroughly checked. It ought to be impossible.”

“Does the clinic management know there are drugs here?”

“Obviously.”

“Why don’t they intervene?”

Corinne looked at him in surprise.

“And do what? Call the police? Make sure the guilty parties are prosecuted? Punish them? They’ve already been convicted and punished. All that’s already been done. They’re beyond courts and prisons now. There are no further sanctions available. All that’s left is the accurate and scientific study of what happens.”

“So they study the drug trade but they don’t stop it?” Daniel exclaimed.

Corinne wound the last of the cotton strap around her hand and fastened it.

“Of course they don’t want drugs here. But they’re here, in which case they have to be taken into account in any research. Who the dealers are, who the runners are, and who ends up buying. Who gets rich from the trade, and who ends up poor. What method of payment is used: money, goods, services, prostitution. There’s a sociologist here, Brian Jenkins, the one with the red beard, who’s interested in this sort of thing.”

“What research methods does he use? Does he stand there taking notes as the deals are done?” Daniel asked as he slowly began to pedal again.

“He interviews residents in his office. Talks to the staff. Gathers information. A bit here, a bit there. Some residents can be extremely helpful if they think it’ll do them some good.”

“Snitches?”

“I think they’re called informants.”

“What do you get by passing on information?”

Corinne pulled on a pair of boxing gloves.

“You get a gold star in your case file. It’s important to keep on good terms with the research team.”

“But you’d hardly get a gold star from Kowalski and Sørensen.”

“You can’t please everyone. Look, we’re cooling down now. Come on. You can have the bench press.”

Corinne set about gently hitting a punching ball. Daniel watched her in fascination. As she shifted her weight from one leg to the other she increased her speed. The ball slapped rhythmically against its wooden base as her bracelet of colored stones rattled against the edge of the glove.

“What’s the matter with you? Haven’t you ever seen a woman box before?”

“Not wearing a bracelet, no.”

She ignored his comment and went on punching. Daniel struggled on with the exercise bike.

“Do you want to try it?” she asked after a while.

He got off the bike and she wrapped his hands the same way she had done her own a short while before, then pulled on the gloves, still damp with her sweat, and fastened the Velcro straps. Daniel felt like his mother was putting his mittens on so he could go outside and play in the snow.

She showed him the various blows: jab, right and left hooks, and uppercut.

“Who taught you to box?” he asked.

“I did a bit of training before I came here. But I’m mostly self-taught. There are plenty of people here who could teach me more. But I don’t want to be dependent on anyone else. My training is my little secret. It’s best that way.”

Daniel gave the ball a punch and leaped back as it swung back toward him, then hit it again.

“Hey,” Corinne said. “Don’t break my punching ball. It was hard enough to get hold of as it is, and the clinic management will never get me another one. Not so hard. That’s it. And let your body roll with the punch. Good.”

He carried on and found a rhythm, but it was much harder than it looked, and after a short while he gave up.

“You’ve got talent,” Corinne said. “Ask the management for a pair of gloves. Then we could practice sparring together.”

Daniel laughed breathlessly. His shirt was drenched in sweat.

“Doesn’t all this exercising bother your neighbors? It must make a fair bit of noise,” he pointed out as he pulled the gloves off.

“I’m on my own in the building. The ground floor is used as a storeroom for the shops. And the first floor is vacant at the moment. It’s nice being by myself. But on the other hand, if I do ever get into trouble, no one will hear me screaming,” she said with a smile. “Do you want to take the weights, or shall I?”

Daniel held up his hands.

“I think that’s enough for today.”

“The shower’s over there by the front door,” Corinne said as she lay down on the bench under the weights.

When he emerged from the bathroom with Corinne’s bath towel round his hips, she had prepared a pitcher of rhubarb cordial with ice and had changed into a terry-cloth robe.

While she showered he sat down on the red sofa and poured himself a drink. He looked around the large, strange room. On one chair were her sweaty gym clothes. On impulse he put his hand into the right pocket of her jogging pants and pulled out her cell phone. He glanced quickly at the bathroom door, then checked for received messages. Completely empty. The same with sent messages. Evidently she erased everything straight away.

But in saved messages he found something: one solitary message from someone identified only as “M.” He opened it and read:
I feel happy every time I see you. Be careful.
It was sent on May twenty-first. He looked round for a pen to write down the phone number, but the water had stopped in the bathroom and he quickly put the phone back.

Corinne came out. She was holding the bathrobe shut with one hand as she squeezed the water from her hair with the other.

“Am I the only person in Himmelstal who’s seen you exercising?” Daniel asked.

“Yes,” she said, sitting down in the armchair, then added, “Apart from Max, of course.”

She poured herself a glass of rhubarb cordial and drank it thirstily.

“Did you exercise together?”

Corinne laughed.

“You really don’t know your brother very well, do you? He hated getting sweaty. He’d never attempt any sport more strenuous than fishing.”

Daniel hesitated for a moment.

“It’s really none of my business. But what sort of relationship did you have?”

“Max and I? Well. It would be wrong to say we were friends. You don’t have friends in Himmelstal. But we used to spend time together. We could talk to each other. It started in the drama group, where I was the director. We put on a production of
The Good Woman of Setzuan.
A shortened adaptation that I’d been involved in myself before I came here. Max played the pilot. He was good. He understood whatever I said at once. He could have been a good actor if he’d chosen that path. The production was a great success, and after that he often came down to Hannelores Bierstube and chatted to me while I worked. Sometimes he came home with me afterward.”

She noticed the way he was looking at her and quickly clarified: “We didn’t have a sexual relationship. Neither of us was interested in that. We just sat here like this, talking.”

“How come you dared to bring him home? You were the one who told me not to open my door to anyone. Did you really trust him?”

Corinne thought for a moment.

“Well obviously I was exposing myself to a degree of physical risk. But there’s a different risk in Himmelstal, and when Max arrived in the valley that risk was starting to feel more and more of a threat: going mad. Mad with suspicion, isolation, and anonymity. I was so tired of always sitting here alone in the evenings, staring at the remnants of my old life.”

She glanced at the theater posters and masks on the walls.

“I longed to be able to talk about myself, to share my thoughts with another person. Nothing particularly deep or important. Just that someone would know a bit about who I am. I used to get that feeling when we were rehearsing
The Good Woman
and Max and I would talk about the play. And I didn’t want that feeling to stop. So I went on spending time with him, and I asked him back here with me so we could talk freely without everyone in the bierstube listening in. He was entertaining, nice. He made me laugh.”

Daniel felt a pang of jealousy.

“Did you know he’d beaten women up?”

Corinne nodded.

“Gisela had warned me. But I didn’t care if he killed me. Rather that than being as isolated as I had been.”

“You and Gisela Obermann seem to know each other pretty well.”

Corinne said nothing for a few moments.

“I like her,” she finally said. “And I think she likes me. But she’s a doctor. You can’t talk openly with a doctor. It’s a completely unequal relationship. She has total control over me. One careless word from me and she could send me to the Catacombs.”