Jonathan Rabb - Rosa

Kripo Sascha was sitting on the ground, reading outside the wire room, when Hoffner pushed through and into the corridor. At once the boy stood. He took a folded sheet from inside the book and held it out to Hoffner.

Hoffner took the note and said, “So, when did it come in?”

“Just over an hour ago, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar. ” The boy spoke with great precision.

“And no one else has seen it?”

Sascha looked almost hurt by the question. “No, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar. No one.”

“Good.” Hoffner crooked his head to the side so as to take a look at the book in the boy’s hand. The Count of Monte Cristo. Hoffner was liking this boy more and more. “Planning an escape,” Hoffner said with a smile.

For the first time, Sascha let his shoulders drop. He smiled, and shook his head. “No, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar. ”

Hoffner pulled a coin from his pocket and, taking Sascha’s hand, placed it in the boy’s open palm. “Our secret.” Before Sascha could say a word, Hoffner was nodding him down the corridor.

Hoffner’s mood changed the moment he started reading: WOUTERS DEAD STOP HANGED HIMSELF TWO DAYS AGO STOP STRANGE BEHAVIOR AS OF FIVE MONTHS AGO STOP NO BATHING CUTTING HAIR STOP PUT IN ISOLATION THREE MONTHS AGO STOP AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS STOP

Hoffner read the note several times to make sure he had missed nothing. “No bathing, cutting hair.” He stepped into the wire room.

The man behind the desk was just finishing off a wire. “Yes, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar, ” he said without looking up. “You’ve something for me to send?”

“A reply,” said Hoffner; he handed the original to the man.

The man examined it. “To Bruges?”

“Yes.”

The man took out a pen and paper. “Go ahead.”

“Two words,” said Hoffner. “‘Shave him.’”

Paul Wouters had been destined for Sint-Walburga as early as 1898. His mother, having no way to support or handle the already troubling three-year-old, had given him over to her dead husband’s mother, Anne, to raise. It was, perhaps, not the wisest choice given that the recently deceased Jacob Wouters had committed suicide after a short life in which he had been unable to reach beyond the traumas of his own childhood with Anne. That his bride decided to take her own life three weeks after Jacob’s death pretty well set the table for young Paul.

Anne Wouters was a woman of uncommon cruelty. Whatever love she might have felt for her son, Jacob-and there really was none to speak of-had long since dried up by the time her grandson, Paul, was thrust into her life. By then, she had come to believe that the wretchedness of her existence granted her the right to compound that of the boy. Not that she was aware of her malevolence-the most accomplished never are-but she could never have denied the singular pleasure she took at seeing him, hour after hour, slouched over a bobbin and thread. To her mind, it was justice at its most pure.

Before he was five, Paul was taught the art of lace-making; it was the only skill Anne knew, and would have made for an ideal living, filled with camaraderie and pride, had Anne not given birth to Jacob out of wedlock. At the time, there had been rumors of rape-even Anne had let herself believe them for a while-but the truth was that she had simply been foolish. And so went her life: her sin kept her forever from the inner circles; her skill kept her alive. For, whatever else she might have been, Anne Wouters was, without question, a virtuoso with lace. Everyone in Bruges knew it, and it was why the most intricate patterns always found their way to her tiny attic room at the Meckel Godshuizen, one of the more decrepit almshouses in town. At night, and on the sly, women-unable to match her artistry at the mills-would bring their pieces to her and pay her a tenth of what she deserved, all the while telling her that she was damned lucky to be getting any work at all. She would keep her eyes lowered, her head bowed, as they described the meshes they themselves could never achieve, and her teeth would grow sharp from the silent grinding.

When Paul was old enough to handle the pins himself, she put him to work, and for fifteen hours a day they sat in silence, manipulating the thread. He was unusually small, and though his fingers were nimble, they were often overmatched by the tools. Each missed stroke earned him a deep scraping of those tiny hands with a sharp bristle: there were mornings when the blood would still be tacky on his knuckles as he got back to work. Worse was when she fell short of her quota; then she would tie him to a chair and beat him with a strop. She liked the upper back. It was where the bone was closest to the skin.

Paul’s future life could easily have been attributed to the torture of his eight years with Anne. His choice that one night, when he had grown just tall enough to wrest the bristle from her hand and strike it repeatedly into her throat until her neck snapped and the blood spilled out in a pulsating streamlet, would have seemed the reasonable response to an unbearable situation were it not for the fact that Paul Wouters was not a victim of his circumstances. No doctor was needed to explain his horrifying condition. No, the real reason for his behavior was that Paul had been psychotic from his very inception: he had simply needed time to grow into it. Some are born evil, and Paul Wouters was one of the lucky few whose madness was no by-product of his setting. His father, Jacob, had learned to embrace his self-loathing; his mother had eventually succumbed to her self-pity; even his grandmother Anne could look to the world’s viciousness for her own. But Paul needed none of that. He felt no vindication, no joy in his killing. He killed because he could.

He was not, however, the man now lying naked on a slab at Sint-Walburga. In all fairness to the attendants, they had shaved part of the body yesterday afternoon: the top bit of his skull, so that the doctors could cut through and retrieve the brain. The doctors had been certain that the cause of Wouters’s mania would appear to them in the guise of some malformed lobe or conduit. The brain, however-now in a jar of formaldehyde on the shelf-had proved to be in perfect condition. The chief neurologist’s only response had been to utter the words “How very odd,” over and over again.

Yesterday’s disappointment, however, paled in comparison with this evening’s shock. Van Acker stared in disbelief as the thick locks of hair fell to the floor and revealed a face not at all similar to that of Paul Wouters. The shape and coloring of the narrow little body, on the other hand, were close enough to the contours van Acker remembered.

“You’re sure?” said Fichte, keeping his handkerchief over his nose as the attendants continued to scissor through the hair.

Van Acker shot him a frustrated, if tired, glance. “Yes, Herr Kriminal-Kommissar. I’m sure.”

Wisely, Fichte chose not to answer.

Van Acker turned to the gathering of officials who had accompanied the two policemen to the asylum’s laboratory; he knew he was dealing with idiots. He spoke in French: “You mean to tell me that none of you saw an iota of difference in the man’s appearance, his attitude, his behavior?” Fichte might not have understood a word, but he knew that van Acker was taking his frustrations out on the people who could least help him. Worse, the doctors actually seemed to be pleased to have discovered that they had been dealing with the wrong brain: still hope for the lobe theory, after all. “That seems almost impossible to me,” van Acker continued. “Who were the morons who were supposed to be looking after him?”

The Superintendent spoke up: “There’s no need for that sort of language, Inspector. Clearly, a mistake has been made-”