Free God's Spy by Juan Gómez-Jurado

was saying, Victor Karosky came into
the world in 96 in Katowice, ironically just a few miles from where
Karel Wojtyla was born. In 969 the Karosky family, composed of
himself, his parents and two brothers, emigrated to the United States.
His father found work with General Motors in Detroit and, according to all the records, he was a good worker if somewhat difficult. In
97 there was a cutback owing to the gas crisis, and Karosky senior
was the first worker out the door. By then, the father had received his American citizenship, so he made himself comfortable in the tiny apartment he shared with his family, drinking away his severance pay and unemployment benefit. He really went at it – gave himself over to the task completely. He became another person, and he started to sexually abuse Victor and his older brother. The brother’s name was Beria. When he was fourteen years old, Beria
walked out of the house one day and never came back.’ ‘Karosky told you all this?’ Dicanti asked, intrigued and puzzled
at the same time.
‘Only after intense regression therapy. When he arrived at the
institute, his story was that he came from a model Catholic family.’ Paola, writing everything down in tiny script, rubbed her eyes.
She wanted to dislodge every speck of exhaustion before she started
talking.
‘What you’re telling us fits perfectly with the common registers
of first-level psychopaths: personal charm, absence of irrational
thinking, a lack of trustworthiness and of remorse, a great talent for
dissimulation. The blows from his father and the general consumption of alcohol by his parents have also been observed in more than
seventy-four per cent of known violent psychopaths.’
‘So it’s the probable cause?’ Fowler asked.
‘More likely, it’s one factor among many. I can cite thousands of
cases of people who were brought up in households much worse
than the one you’ve described, and they’ve reached a relatively
normal maturity, if such a thing actually exists.’
‘But we’ve barely scratched the surface. Karosky told us about the
death of his younger brother from meningitis in 97, and no one
seemed really to care about it. I was surprised by how cool Karosky
was when he related this particular episode. Two months after the
child died, his father mysteriously disappeared. Victor didn’t explain
whether he had something to do with the disappearance, although
we didn’t think so, since he would only have been thirteen years
old at the time. But we do know that it was about this time that he
began to torture small animals. The worst thing for him was that he
remained at the mercy of an overbearing mother, who was obsessed
with religion and even went so far as to dress him up as a girl so they
could “play together”. It seems she fondled him under his skirt, and
often told young Victor that she would cut his “little packages” so that his disguise would be complete. The result: Karosky still wet the bed at the age of fifteen. He wore cheap, unfashionable clothes because they were poor. He was teased at school and became very isolated . . . One time a friend made an unfortunate comment about Karosky’s attire as they passed in the corridor. Karosky, furious, repeatedly beat the other kid in the face with a heavy textbook. The kid wore glasses
and the lenses shattered into his eyes. He was left blind. ‘The eyes . . . Just like the cadavers. So that was his first violent
crime.’
‘As far as we know, yes. Victor was sent to a reformatory outside
Boston, and the last thing his mother said to him before waving
goodbye was, “I should have had an abortion.” A few months later
she committed suicide.’
The room went utterly silent. Words seemed indequate. ‘Karosky stayed at the reformatory until the end of 979. We don’t
have anything on that year, but in 980 he entered a seminary in
Baltimore. His application forms stated that his record was clean
and that he came from a traditional Catholic family.