The Conspiracy Club

39

He overslept, ate no breakfast, dressed as if donning a costume.

His first appointment was Doug Vilardi at eleven. The young man would be starting chemotherapy that afternoon. If that and more radiation didn’t bring about remission, the only option was a bone marrow transplant, and that meant transfer to another hospital, fifty miles away.

The decision to opt for treatment could have been agonizing. Treatment had saved Doug’s life, but it had also poisoned his bone marrow.

Doug hadn’t wavered. “What the fuck, Doc. What’m I supposed to do? Curl up and die? I got a baby coming.”

Not a particularly smart kid, not sophisticated or articulate. The challenge for Jeremy had been helping him put his thoughts into words. But once he’d gotten there, Doug had sailed.

Jeremy’s approach had been to ask about bricklaying.

“You should see, I built some walls, man. Some serious walls.”

Me too.

“Know that cathedral- St. Urban’s, over on the south end? The rectory on the side- the smaller building, it’s all brick, not like the church, which is stone? We repaired that, my company and me. Had all these curves, you look at it, think how’d they do that.”

Jeremy knew the cathedral, had never noticed the rectory. “And it came out good.”

“Better than good, man, it was… beautiful. Everyone said so, the priests, all of ’em.”

“Good for you.”

“It wasn’t only me, it was the whole crew. I learned from those guys. Now we got newer guys, and I’m teaching them. I gotta get back to work. If I don’t work I feel…”

Doug threw up his hands.

Jeremy nodded.

“My mom’s scared of them treating me. Says they caused my new problem. But what the fuck, Doc. What’m I supposed to do…”

Jeremy drove to the hospital thinking about the young man’s optimism. Probably something constitutional; from what Jeremy had seen, a positive outlook had little to do with your actual life experiences. Some folks saw the donut, others the holes.

That late-night supper said the old eccentrics were donut people. Survivors believing themselves worthy of linen and china and silver, three meats, foie gras, petits fours, the driest of champagnes.

The late-night supper had been the first fabulous meal Jeremy had enjoyed in… years.

Where did he fit in the donut-hole continuum?

Observer, ever the diarist.

When he got to his office, a note from the Head of Oncology was in his box.

JC: Perused your chapter. Here are a few suggestions but all in all, fine. When can we look forward to a completed manuscript?

Also in the box was a cardboard box, stamped BOOK RATE, and postmarked locally.

Inside was a hardcover book bound in forest green cloth.

THE BLOOD RUNS COLD:

Serial Killers and Their Crimes

by

Colin Pugh

Twelve-year-old copyright, British publishing house, no jacket, no details on the author.

Inside the cover was a penciled price-$12.95- and black, rubber-stamped, Gothic lettering that read Renfrew’s Central Book Shop, Used & Antiquarian, followed by the defunct store’s address and phone number.

He’d never thought of the place as having a name, let alone a number- could never recall hearing a phone ring as he browsed. He dialed the seven digits, got a “disconnected” message, and felt comforted.

His name and hospital address were typed on the carton. He checked inside for a card or message, found none, flipped the book’s pages.

Nothing.

Turning to the first chapter, he began reading.

Fifteen chapters, fifteen killers. He’d heard of most of them- Vlad the Impaler, Bluebeard, the Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, Son of Sam, Jack the Ripper (the chapter on the Whitehall fiend confirmed Jeremy’s graffiti recollection; the exact wording of the chalked scrawl had been: “The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing”). A few he hadn’t: Peter Kurten (“the Dusseldorf Monster”), Herman Mudge, Albert Fish, Carl Panzram.

He lapsed into skimming. Details of the outrages blurred and the perpetrators merged into one ghastly mass. For all their grisly work, murderous psychopaths were a boring bunch, creatures of morbid habit, forged from the same twisted mold.

The final chapter caught Jeremy’s eye.

Gerd Dergraav: the Laser Butcher.

Dergraav was a Norwegian-born physician, the son of a German diplomat father stationed in Oslo and a dentist mother who abandoned the family and moved to Africa. A brilliant student, young Gerd studied medicine and qualified as both an otolaryngolist and an ophthalmologist. Shifting interests, yet again, he served as a chief resident in obstetrics-gynecology at the Oslo Institute for Female Medicine. The war years were spent doing research in Norway. In 1946, he took an advanced fellowship in the treatment of obstetric tumors in Paris.

His father died in 1948. Fully certified in three subspecialties, Dergraav moved to his mother’s home city, Berlin, where he built a highly successful practice delivering babies and attending to the disorders of women. His patients adored him because of his sensitivity and his willingness to listen. All were unaware of the six hidden cameras in Dergraav’s examining room that allowed the doctor to amass a six-hundred-reel library of naked women.

Early details of Dergraav’s childhood were lacking, and author Pugh supplanted fact with Freudian speculation. One fact had been verified: Shortly after arriving in Germany, the urbane young doctor began picking up prostitutes and torturing them. Ample payments to the street women procured their silence. So did the absence of scars; Dergraav had a brute’s lust but a surgeon’s touch. Later interviews with the early victims revealed Dergraav’s penchant for humiliating his victims, and a secret cache of videotapes from the doctor’s later years showed him whipping, punching, biting, and jabbing with hypodermic needles over two hundred women. He also enjoyed plunging their hands into icy water and compressing their limbs with blood-pressure cuffs, then measuring time latency till pain sensation. Frequently, Dergraav filmed himself, as well, in close-up. Smiling subtly.

A handsome man, Pugh claimed, though no photo confirmation was offered.

During the late fifties, Dergraav married an upper-class woman, the daughter of a fellow physician, and fathered a child.

Shortly after, bodies of prostitutes began showing up in the slums of Berlin, cut into pieces.

Street gossip eventually led to attention being focused on Dr. Dergraav. Questioned in his office, the gynecologist professed surprise that the police would suspect him of anything sinister, and he evinced no anxiety or guilt. The detectives had trouble imagining the charming, soft-spoken surgeon as the demon behind the horrific mutilations they were encountering more and more frequently. Dergraav was filed as a low-probability suspect.

The prostitute butcherings continued on and off for nearly a decade. The killer’s disdain for his victims intensified, and he dehumanized them by mixing up body parts and combining them, so that limbs and organs from several different women came to be found bagged together in plastic sacks and left in trash bins. When forensic evidence from a victim in 1964 led the coroner to conclude that a laser had been used for dissection, the police reviewed their notes and discovered Dergraav traveled to Paris, yet again, to learn how to use the still-experimental instrument for eye surgery. This seemed curious, as Dergraav wasn’t an ophthalmologist, and they questioned him again. Dergraav apprised them of his ophthalmologic training, proved it with certificates, and claimed he was thinking of switching back to his former subspecialty because of the promise offered by lasers for corneal ablation.

The police asked if they could search his office.

The doctor’s consent was needed; no grounds for a warrant existed. Charmingly, smilingly, Dergraav declined. During the interview, he laughed and told the investigators they couldn’t be farther off the mark. His use of the laser was limited to academics, and the instrument was far too expensive for him to own. Furthermore, his gynecologic specialty was the surgical treatment of vulvodynia- vaginal pain. He was a physician, his mission in life was to alleviate agony, not cause it.

The police left. Three days later, Dergraav’s office suite and his home were emptied and padlocked and wiped clean of fingerprints. The doctor and his family were gone.

Dergraav’s wife surfaced a year later in England, then in New York, where she professed ignorance of her husband’s behavior and his whereabouts. She sought, and was granted a divorce from Dergraav, changed her name, and was never heard from again. Colin Pugh cited speculation that the doctor had been taken in by American officials as payback for wartime cooperation by Dergraav’s father. The Oslo-based diplomat had deceived his Nazi masters and passed crucial information to the Allies. However, this remained rumor, and subsequent sightings of Gerd Dergraav placed him far from the States: in Switzerland, Portugal, Morocco, Bahrain, Beirut, Syria, and Brazil.

The last two locales were verified. Some time during the early ’70s, Dergraav slipped into Rio de Janeiro using a Syrian passport issued in his own name and managed to obtain expedited Brazilian citizenship. Remarried, with a child, he lived openly in Rio, purchasing a villa above Ipanema Beach and volunteering his services to a human rights group that offered free medical service to the slum dwellers of the city’s fetid favillas.

Dergraav swam, sunbathed, ate well (Argentinian beefsteak was his favorite) and worked tirelessly without pay. Among the human rights workers and the favillitos, he came to be known as the White Angel- a tribute to both his pale coloring and his pure soul.

During his known residence in Rio, that city’s prostitutes began showing up dead and cut into pieces.

Degraav’s second reign of murder lasted another decade. In the end, he was snared by the most banal of circumstances. The screams of a prostitute he was attempting to asphyxiate attracted a gang of hoodlums from the neighboring slum, and Dergraav fled into the night. The thugs exploited the bound and gagged woman’s helplessness by gang-raping her, but they left her alive. After some indecision, she reported the doctor to the police.

Dergraav’s house was searched by Rio detectives, less concerned than their German counterparts with due process. The cache of videotapes was found, including one in which the doctor reduced a woman’s body to forty chunks using a laser scalpel. In the film, Dergraav narrated as he mutilated, describing the procedure just as he would a bona fide surgery. Also retrieved was a suede box filled with women’s jewelry and a cache carved of rosewood, rattling with vertebrae, teeth, and knucklebones.

Imprisoned in Salvador de Bahia prison, Dergraav awaited trial for two years, ever the charmer. Jailers brought him international newspapers, literary magazines, and scientific journals. Catered food was delivered. Citing worries about his cholesterol, Dergraav ate less beef, more chicken.

Rumor had it that money would soon exchange hands, and the doctor would be deported under cover of night, back to the Middle East. Then German authorities learned of the arrest, requested and received permission to extradite. That process stretched on, and Dergraav could be seen sitting in the prison’s courtyard, relaxed, dressed in tropical whites, nuzzling with his wife, playing with his child.

Finally, the German authorities got their way. The day after the extradition certificate was drawn, Dergraav blocked the peephole in his cell with chewing gum, ripped up his jail-issue clothing, knotted the strips into a rope, and hung himself. He was nearly sixty, but had the appearance of a forty-year-old. The jailer who discovered him remarked on the healthy, peaceful appearance of the White Angel’s corpse.

Nearly seventeen years ago, to the day, Gerd Dergraav’s ashes had been strewn at sea.