The following morning, I updated the file on the computer, putting down everything I had discovered, attaching a scan of the document signed by Evi and noting all the hypotheses, questions, and leads that I could think of.
There were a lot of them.
Then I went for a long walk in the cold, hoping a bit of movement might chase away that sense of impending menace. It didn’t help. At lunch, I picked at my food and answered Annelise’s questions with monosyllables, until she got fed up and stopped talking to me.
All I could think about was Evi’s report. With those few pages, she had held up work on the Visitors’ Center for five years. Given the competition in the tourism field, five years are as long as geological eras.
It also occurred to me that if Evi hadn’t been killed on April 28, 1985, and had been able to continue her battle for the conservation of the Bletterbach, of which she was obviously very fond (wasn’t it there, as Brigitte had told me, that her love for Kurt had blossomed? Wasn’t it there that Evi found peace when her mother flipped out?), maybe Hermann Kagol’s Center would still have been nothing more than a plan in its creator’s mind.
No Center, no money.
Money.
A major motive, as old as humanity. When it came down to it, even Rome had been built on the scene of a crime.
Romulus killing Remus over a simple land dispute.
“Papà?”
I didn’t even look up from my plate to answer her. “Yes, sweetheart?”
“Did you know that scorpions aren’t insects?”
“What?”
“Scorpions aren’t insects. Did you know that?”
“Really?”
Clara nodded. “They’re spiders,” she exclaimed, excited by the discovery. “They said so on television.”
I didn’t even listen to her. “Eat your potatoes, sweetheart,” I muttered.
Clara went into a sulk. I didn’t even notice. I was too busy following the thread of my thoughts.
I tried to calculate what the annual turnover of the Visitors’ Center must be. If the statistics I had found online were to be believed, the annual number of tourists paying the entrance fee was somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000. A decent figure, from which the running expenses, maintenance, and all the rest had to be deducted. But that wasn’t the only source of income. Because at least half the visitors who opened their wallets to gaze in awe at the Bletterbach stayed at hotels in Siebenhoch.
And they also ate their meals in Siebenhoch, bought souvenirs, basic foodstuffs, and other things.
“Papà?”
“What is it, sweetheart?”
“What are we doing this afternoon?”
I made an effort to eat a little stew, just to please Annelise. It was very good, but my stomach was closed. That sensation under the skin was still there.
“I don’t know, sweetheart.”
“Shall we go sledding?”
In my mind, the money circulating around the Visitors’ Center was becoming a river of gold.
“Of course.”
Who was the main beneficiary of that fortune? The community, but above all Hermann Kagol. The man who had sold four cows to become . . . what?
“Promise?”
I ruffled her hair. “Promise.”
Four cows and the roof of a henhouse as stepping stones toward becoming, for all intents and purposes, the boss of Siebenhoch. He owned the Visitors’ Center, and he owned the two main hotels in the village.
He had the biggest slice of the earnings.
Hermann Kagol.
I cleared the table. Then I sank into my favorite armchair and switched on the TV. My eyes saw, but my brain didn’t register.
Clara followed me like a puppy, her little face turned toward me. “Papà?”
“Tell me, ten letters.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“I’m watching the news.”
“It’s finished, five letters.”
It was true.
I smiled. “I think five letters needs to clear his head.”
“Shall we go out and play with the sled?”
I shook my head. “Later.”
“When?”
“I have something to do first.”
“But you promised!”
“A couple of hours, no more.” I stood up.
“Where are you going?”
“I have to go to Bolzano. But when I’m back, we’ll go on the sled, OK?”
* * *
I needed evidence. And the only place I could find it was the provincial land registry. There, I would be able to reconstruct the story of the Visitors’ Center.
And then?
Then, I thought just before the phone rang, I would think of an idea.
* * *
“Did I wake you, partner?”
“It’s two in the afternoon and I’m driving.”
“I always get confused with the time difference.”
“Did you do your homework, Mike?”
The line was very poor. Mike’s voice kept cutting out.
I cursed.
Fortunately, I noticed the exit to a service station. I put on the indicator light, found an empty space, and parked. I switched off the speakerphone and raised the phone to my ear.
“First of all, it was a lousy job you gave me. Second of all, the whole thing’s a real mess. What kind of business have you gotten yourself mixed up in?”
I struck a match and breathed in the afternoon’s first mouthful of cigarette smoke. It made me cough a little. “A weird story.”
“I’ll start with the conclusion. Grünwald. Nobody knows what happened to him. One day he just disappeared.”
“When was this? In ’85?”
“April or maybe May 1985.”
“What do you mean April or maybe May? Can’t you be more specific?”
Mike’s voice turned shrill. “Why don’t you do all this stuff yourself, if you’re so good at criticizing other people’s work?”
“Because you’re a genius, Mike. And I’m just a humble hack.”
“Keep going.”
“And you’re the only person in the world who can help me get the chestnuts out of the fire.”
“And?”
“And nothing, this isn’t phone sex.”
“If it was, I’d save my money: do you have any idea how much an intercontinental call costs?”
“You’re using the network’s phone, aren’t you?”
“Do you want me to read you your horoscope, while we’re at it?”
“I want you to start telling me the story. April or May 1985.”
“Oscar Grünwald disappears. He was supposed to be giving a lecture in Ingolstadt, which is a place in—”
“Germany.”
“But he never showed up. The lecture was meant to be on May 7, to be exact. He was replaced by a certain Dr. Van der Velt, a Dutchman. Judging from the credentials of this Van der Velt, they won out on the deal. Grünwald was discredited, Salinger.”
“What does ‘discredited’ mean?”
While Mike was talking, I had dug out a notebook and a ballpoint pen from the dashboard. I placed the notebook on my thigh and started scribbling.
“It means that the universities had started denying him funds.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Grünwald’s academic credibility began to come crashing down in ’83. There were many attacks from the universities.”
“Innsbruck?”
“Innsbruck, Vienna. Two papers from the University of Berlin and one from the University of Verona.”
“How come?”
“The important question is: who was Oscar Grünwald really?”
“A geologist and paleontologist,” I replied.
“Correct, but reductive. Oscar Grünwald,” Mike’s voice had taken on the boring cadence of someone who was reading, and I did my best to transcribe everything he said, “was born in Carinthia, in a suburb of Kla—”
“Klagenfurt.”
“That one. October 18, 1949.”
“In ’85, he was thirty-six years old.”
“Thirty-six years old, with two degrees and a research doctorate. Paleobiology. He was good, let me tell you.”
“Good?”
“A genius, in my opinion.”
“What do you know about geology and paleontology?”
“I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of days. The real question is: how much do you know?”
“I know geology’s the study of rocks and paleontology’s the study of fossils.”
“Have you ever heard of the Permian?”
“It’s the period of the great extinctions, isn’t it?”
And it was also the deepest stratum of the Bletterbach. The pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together.
“The Permian was roughly between 250 and 290 million years ago. In that period, there was the greatest mass extinction in the history of the world. Almost half of all living species disappeared. Half, Salinger. Doesn’t that send a shiver down your spine?”
“Yeah, a big one.”
“There are various theories about what happened. An increase in cosmic radiation, which means they ended up like hamburgers in a huge microwave, a decrease in the productivity of the seas, an inversion of the magnetic poles, an increase in the salt level of the oceans, a decrease in oxygen, an increase in hydrogen sulfide in the atmosphere caused by bacteria. Then there’s my favorite, the one that everybody knows.”
“The asteroid?”
“A huge, wonderful, apocalyptic bowling ball that hit the planet and almost split it down the middle. Hollywood to the nth degree. And without any body doubles, partner. But Grünwald soon got tired of these studies.”
“Why? Did you manage to find out?”
“The chronic lack of funds that’s afflicted big brains like him since time immemorial. Grünwald wasn’t the kind to sit still. He wasn’t content with formulating theories.”
“He wanted proof.”
“Except that in paleontology, finding proof is a little bit expensive. Nobody gave him enough money to organize his research trips. I know I shouldn’t say this, given that he’s a guy I don’t even know, but I quite like him. Who doesn’t like a madman? Except he should have been a screenwriter, not a scientist, believe me.”
“Why?”
“All those who study the Permian ask themselves: ball of fire or mega earthquake? Farting micro-organisms or volcanoes in heat? But Grünwald asked himself a much more interesting question. Why did some survive and others not? Genetics? Luck? And so we arrive at the theory of ecological niches. That’s the theory that brought about his downfall.”
“What the hell are they?”
“Physical places affected by the apocalyptic conditions of the Permian but in a version that was kind of softer, allowing the species living there to escape the cataclysm. They slaughtered him.”
“How do you mean?”
“Grünwald’s theory was that there might still be places today where it was plausible that biological specimens that didn’t evolve but survived the great mass extinctions were still alive.”
“Didn’t evolve but survived? And still alive today? Jurassic Park without all that stuff about the toads and the DNA?”
“Exactly.” I could see him shaking his head sadly. “He had a research post in Innsbruck and they fired him. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with him. No more papers, no more books.”
“How did he earn a living?”
“As a geologist. He organized trips to the Andes, where he had a few local contacts. He worked as a consultant, and even earned a bit of money as a tourist guide or a street vendor. He got by on what he could find. Then, in ’85, he vanishes.”
“Didn’t anybody look for him?”
“Not as far as I know,” was Mike’s curt reply.
I thought about Brigitte. About her album of Evi’s triumphs.
“Evi Baumgartner,” I muttered.
“Pardon me?”
“Evi Baumgartner,” I repeated, staring at a bird of prey, perhaps a falcon, drawing slow spirals in that day’s clear sky.
“Who’s she?”
“If you look at the papers that demolished Grünwald’s academic credibility, I’m sure you’ll find her name.”
And a motive.
I heard Mike tapping on the keyboard of his computer.
“Nothing.”
I’d been a fool. “Try Tognon,” I said, remembering that this was Evi’s official surname.
Another burst of gunfire.
“Bingo. University of Innsbruck. And not one of the papers that demolished our friend’s credibility, but the papers that all the others drew on. Who is this Evi?”
“One of the victims of the Bletterbach.”
“What did you say?”
“I said she was one of the victims of the Bletterbach. The story I’m trying to reconstruct.”
Mike muttered something. More noise of fingers moving frenetically over the keyboard.
“Is that written with c and h at the end?”
“Bletterbach? Yes, why?”
Mike imitated the baritone voice-overs on film trailers. “A major twist, partner.”
“Will you stop playing the fool?”
“I’m not playing the fool. You’re bang in the middle of an ecological niche.”
“Impossible. That kind of stuff is science fiction.”
“Oh, yes?” Mike said. “Let me give you a short rundown on our friend Grünwald’s book. Alto Adige has its own microclimate. In theory, it should have a continental climate, but it’s in the middle of the Alps. So no continental climate. But since it has the Alps, then the climate should be Alpine, right? Wrong. The Alps protect it from winds from the north, the Alps protect it from the influence of the Mediterranean, but the Alps don’t dictate the climate of the region, they create a different one: a microclimate. Which, as a point of information, Grünwald considered the primary condition for the development of an ecological niche. And now hold on to your hat, because this is really funny.”
“Shoot.”
“In Alto Adige, there are varieties of ginkgo plants that became extinct in Europe hundreds of thousands of years ago. Yet there they are, under the Dolomites, making nonsense of our scientific beliefs, and they’re in good company. For example, the nautilus. In theory, it became extinct 400 million years ago. In Alto Adige, they’ve found fossil remains going back to 200 million years ago.”
“Are you telling me that while the nautilus was extinct in the rest of the world, here it was still swimming around for another 200 million years? Science fiction, Mike.”
“No, ecological niches. I’ve checked this out.”
“But—”
“Listen. In one of Grünwald’s last papers, there was a mention of the Bletterbach. In a magazine halfway between The X-Files and Doctor Who. You know, the kind that predict the end of the world every two weeks.”
My heart beat faster. “And?”
“Grünwald had identified the Bletterbach as one of the possible sites in which living biological material that had survived the Permian could be found. A very specific species. And I’m not talking about a little fish like Nemo, dammit. I’ll send you a scan.”
I waited until my cell phone emitted a beep.
I looked.
And sat there staring at the screen open mouthed.
A kind of scorpion with a mermaid’s tail. An elongated body covered with a shell that made it look like a lobster. I had never seen anything so hostile.
That was the word that came into my mind at that moment: “hostile.”
Seven letters.
“What the hell is it?”
“Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae. Forgive my pronunciation.”
I tried to imagine the kind of world that could have hosted a creature like that. A planet swarming with monsters devoid of any emotion beyond an urge to hunt, a world that God decided one fine day to sweep away.
Mike continued. “A gigantic ancestor of our modern spiders, or rather, of scorpions.” Something lit up in my brain, but when I tried to grab it, it had already faded. “An arthropod. But a marine arthropod. It lived in water. It was two and a half meters long. The claws were 50 centimeters long.”
“And Grünwald was convinced that one of these things was still alive and living in the Bletterbach?”
“Under the Bletterbach. He talks about underground caves and lakes. That thing lived in fresh water. And it was a predator it was best to keep well away from.”
I almost didn’t hear this last comment of Mike’s. Siebenhoch, I was thinking.
Its old name was Siebenhöhlen. Seven caves.
“Are you still there, Salinger?”
“Do you have pen and paper?” I croaked. “There’s someone else I’d like you to investigate: Hermann Kagol. He’s a local businessman.”
“When did he die?”
“I talked to him yesterday. I want to know everything you can find out about him. Concentrate in particular on what he’s worth.”
“Is he rich?”
“Stinking rich.”
“But what’s this guy got to do with Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae and Grünwald?”
“Thanks, Mike.”
* * *
The interior of the land registry in Bolzano was pleasantly lit and very modern. Luckily for me, the staff were very kind, even when I tried to explain what I needed.
I had to wait half an hour, which I spent trying to get what Mike had discovered about Grünwald into some kind of perspective. The man had certainly had some weird theories. Things better suited to a movie than to the stuffy world of academia.
I realized that Grünwald was the only protagonist of this story I didn’t have a photograph of. I imagined him as a kind of mad scientist, dressed like a mixture of Indiana Jones and a nineteenth-century bureaucrat, only much more awkward. I don’t know why, given that this was a man who had conducted research in the Andes, but I couldn’t see him coping with a steep rock face: I saw him more as a guy who tripped over his own feet, maybe with a bow tie around his neck.
Clearly, Grünwald had been a man obsessed with his work. He had sacrificed everything for his theories. Mike hadn’t mentioned any wife or girlfriend. The fact that he had vanished from one day to the next without anybody becoming suspicious suggested a social life that was close to non-existent. A lone wolf with one sole purpose. Finding the ecological niches and thereby redeeming his lost honor.
I shook my head in bewilderment.
Obsessed enough to kill the woman who had destroyed his career? Maybe. What was the meaning of that telegram? Had Evi wanted to go down into the caves under the Bletterbach to refute Grünwald’s theories once again, and had Grünwald been unable to bear yet another humiliation?
Maybe the sweet Evi had actually been a bitch, blinded by her rapid rise in the academic world and eager to confirm how ridiculous Grünwald’s theories were, just to show off to the big shots at the university?
I couldn’t see her like that, not with those limpid eyes and with everything I’d been told about her. On the other hand, I told myself as I paced back and forth along the corridor of the land registry, people always speak well of the dead.
There was another possibility.
Maybe Evi, who loved the Bletterbach so much and knew it better than anybody else, had had second thoughts. Maybe she had realized that Grünwald’s theories about ecological niches weren’t so crazy after all and had decided to explore the caves under the Bletterbach, hoping to find evidence that would restore Grünwald’s academic credibility, which she had helped to demolish.
It was certainly a possibility.
But giant scorpions from the Permian?
Come on, now.
And yet . . .
I had a fleeting vision. The photographs Max had shown me, the ones taken at the scene of the crime. The amputations. The twisted, broken arms.
The wounds.
The decapitation of Evi.
Could those horrible mutilations have been caused by the half-meter-long claws of the Jaekelopterus Rhenaniae? What if . . .
A voice brought me back to reality.
The assistant who led me to a kind of reading room with a very high ceiling had a beard that tumbled down over his shirt and eyes concealed behind big glasses. He pointed me to an ugly but functional metal desk on which lay several piles of folders.
“Good luck.”
I sat down, making my ribs creak. I sighed. And started reading.
* * *
This is what I discovered: the Bletterbach Visitors’ Center was opened on September 8, 1990. The work had gone well and without dis-ruption.
The design had been entrusted to a highly regarded Austrian architect, who in bringing the project to fruition had tried to “preserve the natural beauty of the location, while combining it with modern technology and functionality”—whatever that meant.
I didn’t find Evi’s report. It wasn’t there. Or rather, it was mentioned in the index to the file, but someone had taken it. And I knew perfectly well who that had been.
Nevertheless, increasingly puzzled, I checked the rest of the documentation from top to bottom.
One year after Evi’s report, in 1986, a geologist named Dr. Rossetti brought out a counter report, a much longer and more structured one, demonstrating—to cut a long story short—that the Visitors’ Center was a more than feasible project.
In particular, Dr. Rossetti suggested, “There is no risk of landslides, given that the upper stratum of the site is composed of granite materials that adapt well to the capacities of the structure presented for review by Kagol Construction.” Four cows transformed into an empire.
In ’88, there was a third report, compiled by an engineer named Pfauch, again favoring the construction of the Visitors’ Center. It was an exact copy of the one produced by Dr. Rossetti two years earlier. Strange, I told myself.
Something about the fact that two favorable reports had been presented within a couple of years of each other aroused my curiosity. I rushed to the municipal library.
I wanted to figure out the reason for all that effort.
* * *
By the time I got there, I was out of breath and starting to get a migraine. Not even half a kilo of aspirin could have got rid of the pain.
It didn’t stop me. What I had discovered at the land registry had been mouthwatering.
I filled in request forms, waited, discovered that my phone was out of battery, waited some more. At last I got down to work. More pages of my notebook, more notes.
For once, though, answers.
In ’86, a few months after signing off on the report in favor of Hermann Kagol’s project, Dr. Rossetti had been arrested. A nasty case of bribery.
You wanted to build a huge seventy-story hotel on a sandy beach, a place where sea turtles reproduced? All you needed was a few tens of millions of lire and Dr. Rossetti was the man who would do what you wanted.
Rossetti’s arrest must have put a spoke in the wheels of Kagol Construction, and so Hermann, finding himself in a difficult situation financially, had had to turn to another expert, the engineer Andreas Pfauch.
I couldn’t find any stain on this man’s résumé, no bribes, no shady deals, but I felt justified in asking myself a question.
When he produced this crucial final report, Pfauch was ninty-three years old. Could a near-centenarian really be considered reliable? Anything was possible, even that monsters with shells and claws lived in the Bletterbach, but the story reeked to me of fraud.
I said goodbye to the staff of the library and set off for home. Along the way I stopped at a pharmacy. My migraine had become a miniature Permian.
* * *
I don’t remember anything about the ride from Bolzano to Siebenhoch, only the darkness and the wild stream of my thoughts. I didn’t concentrate on the road, only on Hermann Kagol, the Visitors’ Center, and what had happened to those poor young people.
I had remembered a detail that Mike had discovered while investigating Grünwald, one that hadn’t struck me at the time. Now it assumed quite a whole other significance.
When Grünwald had been cut off from the academic world, cut off above all financially, how had he managed to earn his crust? Among other things, Mike had said, by doing consulting work. And what kind of consulting work could a geologist do?
Risk assessments.
Poor Grünwald. There were no monstrous creatures under the Bletterbach. The real monsters lived above the Bletterbach, they walked on two legs and didn’t have claws.
I even hazarded a guess that Evi, driven by a sense of guilt, had entrusted the report on the feasibility of the Visitors’ Center to Grünwald, to help him make ends meet, simply putting her own name to it. That way, working together, they had ruined Hermann’s plans. Which would also explain Grünwald’s mysterious disappearance so soon after the Bletterbach killings.
Mike would have said that this part of the theory was a bit shaky. Above all, I had no proof. But that was a detail I could remedy by digging further. The main point remained.
The report had cost Hermann a lot of money. Of that there was no doubt.
And then what had happened?
Hermann had waited for the right moment, and luckily for him the self-regenerating storm had provided an ideal cover for the murders. He had killed Kurt, Evi, and Markus. Then he had gotten rid of Oscar Grünwald.
Once again, Mike’s voice inside my head contradicted me.
What about Chief Krün?
True, Max also had a file on the richest man in the village and had crossed him off his list of suspects, but rich men can buy alibis easily. Alibis everyone must have believed, even that paranoid obsessive Max, but not Günther. Günther had reached the same conclusions as me. But he hadn’t had the courage to denounce his own brother.
These were the serious allegations he had hinted at to Brigitte when he was drunk.
It all made sense.
The man who had transformed Siebenhoch into one of the main tourist centers in the region was actually a vicious murderer. The money that every inhabitant of the village handled every day dripped with the blood of three innocents. Evi, Kurt, and Markus. One question remained.
What to do?
Go and have another talk with Brigitte, I told myself. Maybe some detail or other would come back to her. Maybe Günther had hinted at something that she had dismissed. Yes, I told myself, Brigitte might be the key to everything.
When I got home, I didn’t notice that the lights were off. I parked and hid the notebook in the inside pocket of my winter jacket. Then I took out the key.
“Where have you been?”
Werner’s voice.
I jumped.
“You startled me.”
“Where were you?”
I had never seen him in that state. He had dark rings under his eyes, skin so drawn as to appear almost shiny, and red eyes as if he had been crying. He was clenching and unclenching his fists as if he wanted to hit me.
“In Bolzano.”
“Have you checked your phone?”
I took it out. It was dead. “Oops.”
Werner grabbed me by the lapel of my jacket. In spite of his age, his grip was like steel.
“Werner!”
“Hermann called me,” he snarled. “He told me you’re planning to write a book. You asked him a whole lot of questions. You lied to me. You lied to your wife.”
Where my stomach should have been, I had a hole.
No lights in the house. No voices. That could only mean that Annelise had carried out her threat and left.
I felt myself sink.
“Does Annelise know?”
“If she does, I didn’t tell her.”
“Then why isn’t there anyone at home?”
Werner released his grip. He took a step back and looked at me in disgust. “They’re at the hospital.”
“What happened?” I stammered.
“Clara,” Werner said.