Benny made a dismissive gesture. ‘That’s all humbug.’
‘Oh yeah? It says here that HSPs used to be sages and advisers at the royal courts of old. Or, thanks to their ability to empathize with the thoughts and emotional state of others, they became diplomats, artists, financial experts…’ Valka glanced at Benny over the top of the paper. ‘That would explain why you were always on at me to put mercy before justice, go easy on my enemies, and all that shit.’ He snorted noisily. ‘It also explains why I made you my bookkeeper.’
Benny’s expression didn’t change even now that Valka had finally came to the real reason for this meeting: money.
‘But it also says’ – Valka looked down at the article and clicked his tongue – ‘that HSPs have a regrettable tendency to become depressive. Lots of them go insane and commit suicide.’
‘I’m still alive.’
‘Yes, thanks more to your brother than yourself.’
‘Must we talk about Marc?’
Valka guffawed. ‘Glad you reminded me of what I really wanted to show you. Come with me.’
Tossing his apron on to the counter, he picked up the secateurs and gave Benny an unmistakable signal to follow him into the back room.
Valka used the windowless room next door as a storeroom. Not for flowers, fertilizer or vases, but – as Benny was appalled to see – for garbage. Human garbage, and this specimen was still alive.
‘It’s time we cured you of this HSP disorder of yours,’ said Valka, pointing to a naked man lashed to a St Andrew’s cross. Jammed into his mouth was an orange bit ball with a central aperture the diameter of a drinking straw – his only means of breathing. He was on the verge of asphyxia, given that he couldn’t inhale any air through his nose, which was broken.
‘I want you to pay close attention,’ said Valka. He turned on an inspection lamp dangling from the ceiling, rhythmically clicking the secateurs in his other hand as he did so. The gagged man’s eyes widened at the sound. He couldn’t see the blades because his head was imprisoned in a sort of clamp that prevented him from turning it. The retaining screws were inserted in his ears, and blood was already seeping from the left one.
Benny started to turn away.
‘No, no, no.’ Eddy clicked his tongue several times as though quietening a horse. ‘Watch carefully.’
He went right up to the naked man and held the secateurs immediately in front of his face. The blades struck sparks from his victims’ pupils, he was breathing more and more frantically.
‘That article really opened my eyes, Benny. It said that HSPs are exceptionally sensitive to pain. Is that correct?’
Benny was speechless with horror.
‘Many of them don’t even respond to anaesthetics. Imagine the torture of going to the dentist!’
Valka thrust his victim’s upper lip aside with the secateurs. The man had bad, nicotine-stained teeth.
‘But what I found most interesting, Benny, was that people like you are said to be particularly sensitive to the sufferings of others. It seems they often feel other people’s pain more intensely than their own.’
Valka raised the man’s right eyelid with his thumb.
‘Stop it,’ Benny whimpered, although he knew it was futile. Valka wanted to demonstrate what would happen to him if he failed to repay the 90,000 euros he’d borrowed.
Valka turned to him one more time. ‘That makes things simpler for me, my sensitive young friend. It means I can inflict pain on you without harming a hair of your head.’
Benny stared at the rhythmically heaving chest of the naked man, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. Looking into those bulging eyes, he smelt the fear in which the dank little room was steeped. He could feel it on his skin and taste it under his tongue, and he knew that, in the next few seconds, he himself would be in excruciating pain – as if his own eyeball were being scooped from its socket and the optic nerve severed with a pair of rusty secateurs.
7
The Bleibtreu Clinic was situated in Französische Strasse, not far from the Gendarmenmarkt. An old building facelifted with glass and steel, it immediately conveyed that the only national-health patients privileged to enter its portals were the cleaning women who worked there.
After the luxury of his preliminary car ride, which deposited him right outside the private elevators on Level 2 of the underground car park, Marc had been prepared for anything: for a koi carp pool in the reception area, Irish linen hand towels in the designer toilets and a waiting room fit to compete with a Singapore Airlines’ first-class lounge. But his expectations were surpassed when he found that the luxurious eleventh-floor men’s room afforded a panoramic view of Friedrichstrasse. Those who got up this far might be suffering from some mental disorder, but they could still piss on the rank and file. His father would definitely have approved of this tasteful squandering of patients’ fees. ‘Money only feels at home in an expensive wallet’ had always been a maxim of his.
Marc, on the other hand, felt like a vegetarian in an abattoir when he was prevailed on to sign a pledge of confidentiality and fill in a patient’s questionnaire in the clinic’s modernistic waiting room. Half an hour earlier he’d had to surrender his mobile phone, all metallic objects and even his wallet to the security guard in reception.
‘Purely precautionary,’ Bleibtreu had explained. ‘You’d never believe the lengths our competitors would go to in order to steal the fruits of our research.’
He had then excused himself and handed Marc over to a swarthy-looking assistant who ushered him silently into a dimly lit consulting room and disappeared without a word.
The room reminded him at first sight him of a dentist’s surgery. Its central feature was a white, hydraulically adjustable couch connected to a computer console by numerous cables of different colours.
‘Electroencephalography,’ a woman’s voice said softly. Marc gave a start and swung round as the heavy door behind him shut with a faint click. ‘We’ll be measuring your brainwaves with that.’
Part of the square room was partitioned off by a row of waist-high mandarin trees in tubs. He had failed to notice either the leather three-piece suite behind them or the woman doctor who now rose from one of the arm chairs.
‘My apologies, Dr Lucas, I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m Patrizia Menardi, the inhouse neurologist here.’
She came over to him with her hand extended, managing to look simultaneously affable and dominant, partly because she had a gentle voice but didn’t display even a hint of a smile. Marc detected a tiny groove in her upper lip, presumably the relic of an expertly performed cleft-palate operation. He felt pretty certain that her firm handshake and rather mannish demeanour formed part of a defensive barrier dating back to a time when she’d been teased at school because of her hare lip.
‘Actually, Dr Menardi, I only wanted to-’
‘No, no “doctor”. Just Menardi.’
‘Okay, then please forget my label too. I only use it when booking hotel rooms, but it’s never got me an upgrade yet.’
Her expression didn’t change.
Okay, so humour isn’t her forte.
‘When do I see Professor Bleibtreu again?’ he asked.
‘In a few minutes. In the meantime, I’ll prepare you for examination.’
‘Hold on, I’m afraid you’ve got it wrong. I don’t want to be examined. The professor was simply going to explain the nature of the experiment – purely hypothetically, because, from the look of things, I won’t want to take part in it at all.’
‘Really? I was told you’re our next candidate for MME.’
‘MME?’
‘The memory experiment. The professor will familiarize you with it as soon as he’s completed his rounds. Let’s make the most of the interval by taking down your particulars.’
Marc sighed and looked at his watch.