The Interpretation of Murder

Chapter Ten

Leaving the Metropolitan, we took a carriage across the park to Columbia University's new campus, with its stupendous library. I had not been there since 1897, when I was fifteen and my mother dragged us to the dedication of the Schermerhorn building. Brill, fortunately, did not know of my marginal connection to that clan, or he doubtless would have mentioned it to Freud.

We visited the psychiatric clinic, where Brill had an office. Afterward, Freud announced that he wished to hear about my session with Miss Acton. So, while Brill and Ferenczi remained behind, discussing therapeutic technique, Freud and I took a stroll on Riverside Drive, whose broad promenade afforded a fine lookout on the Palisades, the wild and broken New Jersey cliffs across the Hudson River.

I left out nothing, describing to Freud both my first session with Miss Acton, ending in failure, and the second, ending in her revelations concerning her father's friend, Mr Banwell. He questioned me closely, wanting every detail, no matter how seemingly irrelevant, and insisting that I mustn't paraphrase but relay her exact words. At the close, Freud stubbed out his cigar on the sidewalk and asked whether I thought the episode on the rooftop three years ago was the cause of Miss Acton's loss of voice at the time.

'It would seem so,' I answered. 'There was involvement of the mouth and an injunction not to tell. Something unspeakable had been done to her; therefore she made herself unable to speak.'

'Good. So the fourteen-year-old's shameful kiss on the roof made her hysterical?' said Freud, measuring my reaction.

I understood: he meant the opposite of what he was saying. The episode on the roof, as Freud saw things, could not be the cause of Miss Acton's hysteria. That episode was not from her childhood, nor was it Oedipal. Only childhood traumas lead to neurosis, although a later event is typically the trigger that awakens the memory of the long- repressed conflict, producing hysterical symptoms. 'Dr Freud,' I asked, 'isn't it possible in this one case that an adolescent trauma caused hysteria?'

'It's possible, my boy, except for one thing: the girl's behavior on the roof was already entirely and completely hysterical.' Freud drew another cigar from his pocket, thought better of it, and put it back. 'Let me offer you a definition of the hysteric: one in whom an occasion for sexual pleasure elicits feelings largely or wholly unpleasurable.'

'She was only fourteen.'

'And how old was Juliet on her nuptial night?'

'Thirteen,' I acknowledged.

'A robust, fully mature man — of whom we know nothing other than that he is strong, tall, successful, well-made — kisses a girl on the lips,' said Freud. 'He is obviously in a state of sexual arousal. Indeed, I think we may be confident that Nora had a direct sensation of this arousal. When she says she can still feel this Banwell pulling her body against his, I have little doubt what part of the man's body she felt. All this, in a healthy girl of fourteen, would certainly have produced a pleasurable genital stimulation. Instead, Nora was overcome by the unpleasurable feeling proper to the back of the throat or gorge — that is, by disgust. In other words, she was already hysterical long before that kiss.'

'But mightn't Banwell's advances have been — unwelcome?'

'I very much doubt they were. You disagree with me, Younger.'

I did disagree — strenuously — although I had been trying not to show it.

Freud went on. 'You imagine Mr Banwell thrusting himself on an unwilling and innocent victim. But perhaps it was she who seduced him: a handsome man, her father's best friend. The conquest would have appealed to a girl her age; it would likely have inspired jealousy in her father.'

'She rejected him,' I said.

'Did she?' asked Freud. 'After the kiss, she kept his secret, even after regaining her voice. Correct?'

'Yes.'

'Is that more consistent with fearing repetition of the event — or desiring it?'

I saw Freud's logic, but the innocent explanation of the girl's behavior did not yet seem refuted. 'She refused to be alone with him afterward,' I countered.

'On the contrary,' rejoined Freud. 'She walked with him alone, two years later, by the shore of a lake, a romantic location if ever there was one.'

'But she rejected him there again.'

'She slapped him,' said Freud. 'That is not necessarily a rejection. A girl, like an analytic patient, is required to say no before she says yes.'

'She complained to her father.'

'When?'

'Immediately,' I stated, a little too immediately. Then I reflected. 'Actually, I don't know that. I didn't ask.'

'Perhaps she was waiting for Mr Banwell to make another attempt on her, and, when he did not, she told her father out of pique.' I did not say anything, but Freud could see I was not entirely persuaded. He added, 'In this, my boy, you must bear in mind that you are not disinterested.'

'I don't follow you, sir,' I said.

'Yes, you do.'

I considered. 'You mean I wish Miss Acton to have found Banwell's advances unwelcome?'

'You have been defending Nora's honor.'

I was conscious that I continued to call Miss Acton 'Miss Acton,' whereas Freud called her by her first name. I was also conscious of a rush of blood to my face. 'That is only because I'm in love with her,' I said.

Freud said nothing.

'You must take over the analysis, Dr Freud. Or Brill. It should have been Brill in the first place.'

'Nonsense. She is yours, Younger. You are doing very well. But you must not take these feelings of yours so seriously. They are unavoidable in psychoanalysis. They are part of the treatment. Nora is very probably coming under the influence of the transference, as you are of the counter- transference. You must treat these feelings as data; you must deploy them. They are fictitious. They have no more reality than the feelings an actor generates onstage. A good Hamlet will feel rage toward his uncle, but he will not mistakenly suppose he is actually angry at his fellow tragedian. It is the same with analysis.'

For a time, neither of us spoke. Then I asked, 'Have you ever had — feelings for a patient, Dr Freud?'

'There have been times,' Freud replied slowly, 'when I welcomed such feelings; they reminded me that I was not altogether past desire. Yes, I have had some narrow escapes. But you must remember: I came to psychoanalysis when I was already much older than you, which made it easier for me. In addition, I am married. To the knowledge that these feelings are factitious, there is added, in my case, a moral obligation I could not violate.' It will seem ridiculous, but the only thought in my head after Freud finished was this: how could factitious be synonymous with fictitious}

Freud continued. 'Enough. For now the chief task is to discover the preexisting trauma that caused the girl's hysterical reaction on the roof. Tell me this: why didn't Nora tell the police where her parents were?'

I had asked myself the same thing. Miss Acton had told me that her parents were at George Banwell's country house, yet she had never mentioned this fact to the police, allowing them instead to send message after message to her own family's summer cottage, where no one was home. To me, however, this reticence was not mysterious. I have always envied those able to receive genuine comfort from their parents in times of crisis; there must be no comfort equal to it. But that was never my lot. 'Perhaps,' I answered Freud, 'she didn't care to have her parents nearby after the attack?'

'Perhaps,' he said. 'I concealed my worst self-doubts from my father for the whole of his lifetime. Like you.' Freud made the latter observation as if it were well known; in fact, I had not said a word about it to him. 'But there is always a neurotic ingredient in such concealment. Start on this point with Nora tomorrow, Younger. That is my advice. There is something in that country house. Undoubtedly it will be connected to the girl's unconscious desire for her father. I wonder.' He stopped walking and shut his eyes. A long moment passed. Then, opening his eyes, he said, 'I have it.'

'What?' I asked.

'Well, I have a suspicion, Younger, but I am not going to tell you what it is. I don't want to plant ideas in your head — or hers. Find out if she has a memory connected with this country house, a memory predating the episode on the roof. Remember, be opaque with her. You must be like a mirror, showing her nothing but what she shows you. Perhaps she saw something she should not have seen. She may not want to tell you. Don't let her off.'

On Tuesday, in the late afternoon, the Triumvirate were reassembled in the library. They had a great deal to discuss. One of the three gentlemen turned over, in his fine long hands, a report he had recently received and had shared with the others. The report included, among other things, a set of letters. 'These,' he said, 'we do not burn.'

'I told you: they are degenerates, all of them,' added the portly, ruddy-complexioned man next to him, with the muttonchop sideburns. 'We must wipe them out. One by one.'

'Oh, we will,' said the first. 'We are. But we will make use of them first.'

There was a brief silence. Then the third man, the balding one, spoke. 'What of the evidence?'

'There will be no evidence,' replied the first, 'except what we choose to leave behind.'

Detective Jimmy Littlemore exited the subway at Seventysecond Street and Broadway, the stop closest to the Balmoral. Mr Hugel might have his money on Banwell, but Littlemore hadn't given up on his own leads.

The evening before, when the Chinaman had disappeared, Littlemore had not been able to find out anything about him. The other laundry workers knew him as Chong, but that was all they knew about him. An assistant had told him to come back in the daytime and ask for Mayhew, the bookkeeper.

Littlemore found Mayhew recording figures in a back office. The detective asked the bookkeeper about the Chinaman who worked in the laundry.

'Just penciling in his name now,' said Mayhew, without looking up.

'Because he didn't show up for work today?' asked Littlemore.

'How did you know that?'

'Lucky guess,' said the detective. Mayhew had the information he wanted. The Chinaman's full name was Chong Sing. His address was 782 Eighth Avenue, in Midtown. Littlemore asked if Mr Chong ever made laundry deliveries to the Alabaster Wing — more specifically, to Miss Riverford.

Mayhew looked amused. 'You can't be serious,' he said.

'Why not?'

'The man's Chinese.'

'So?'

'This is a first-class building, Detective. Normally we don't even hire Chinese. Chong was not allowed out of the basement. He was lucky to have a job here at all.'

'Bet he was real grateful,' said Littlemore. 'Why'd you hire him?'

Mayhew shrugged. 'I haven't any idea. Mr Banwell asked us to find work for him, and that is what we did. Evidently, he didn't realize how fortunate he was.'

Littlemore s next task was to find the cabbie who picked up the black-haired man Sunday night. The doormen told the detective to try the stables on Amsterdam Avenue, where all the hacks got their horses. But they said he shouldn't bother going until later. The night drivers didn't come on until nine-thirty or ten.

The interval suited Littlemore just fine. It gave him a chance first to take another look at Miss Riverford's apartment and then to drop in on Betty. She was in a much better mood. Agreeing to come out to a nickelodeon, Betty introduced the detective to her mother and gave a goodbye hug to each of her little brothers — who gaped when the detective showed them his gun and who were delighted when he let them play with his badge and handcuffs. Betty, it turned out, had a new job. She had spent a luckless morning presenting herself at the large hotels, hoping vainly to find a spot for an experienced maid. But at a shirtwaist factory near Washington Square, she got an interview with the owner, a Mr Harris, who hired her on the spot. She would start tomorrow.

The hours of Betty's new job were not so nice: seven in the morning to eight at night. Nor was she enthusiastic about the pay, 'At least it's by the piece,' she said. 'Mr Harris says some of the girls make two dollars a day.'

About half past nine, Littlemore went to the stable on Amsterdam Avenue near 100th Street. Over the next two hours, a good dozen hackney drivers came in to drop off or pick up a horse. Littlemore talked with every one of them but drew a blank. When the last stall was empty, the stableboy told Littlemore to wait for one more old-timer who kept his own horse. Sure enough, a little before twelve, an old nag came slow-stepping in, piloted by an ancient driver. At first the old man wouldn't answer the detective, but when Littlemore began flipping a quarter in the air, he found his tongue. He had indeed picked up a black-haired man in front of the Balmoral two nights ago. Did he remember where they went? He did: the Hotel Manhattan.

Littlemore was speechless, but the old driver had more to say. 'Know what he does when we get there? Climbs straight into another cab, one of those red and green gasoline jobs, right in front of my face. Taking money from my pocket, that's what I calls it, and putting it in somebody else's.'

Freud cut our conversation short, abruptly declaring that he had to return to the hotel at once. I understood what was happening. Luckily, a carriage was right at hand.

The instant Freud and I set foot in the hotel, Jung accosted us. He must have been waiting for Freud to return. With inexplicable ardor, he planted himself right in front of Freud, blocking our way, insisting on speaking with him without delay. The moment was the least propitious possible. Freud had just informed me, with evident embarrassment, how pressing was his need.

'Great heavens, Jung,' said Freud, 'let me through. I have to get to my room.'

'Why? Are you having the — the problem again?'

'Lower your voice,' Freud said. 'Yes. Now let me pass. It is urgent.'

'I knew it. Your enuresis,' said Jung, using the medical term for involuntary micturition, 'is psychogenic.'

'Jung, it is — '

'It is a neurosis. I can help you!'

'It is — ' Freud stopped in mid-sentence. His voice changed altogether. He spoke evenly and very quietly, looking straight at Jung. 'It is now too late.'

An extremely awkward pause ensued. Then Freud went on. 'Do not look down, either of you. Jung, you will turn around and walk just in front of me. Younger, you will be on my left. No, on my left. Walk directly to the elevator. Go.'

Thus arranged, we made a stiff procession to the elevators. One of the clerks stared at us; it was irritating, but I don't think he suspected. To my astonishment, Jung would not stop talking. 'Your Count Thun dream — it is the key to everything. Will you let me analyze it?'

'I am hardly in a position to refuse' was Freud's reply.

Freud's dream of Count Thun, the former Austrian prime minister, was known to everyone who had read his work. Reaching the elevator bank, I tried to leave them. To my surprise, Jung stopped me. He said he needed me. We let one car go; the next we had to ourselves.

Inside the elevator, Jung went on. 'Count Thun represented me. Thun: Jung — it could not be clearer. Both names have four letters. Both share the un, whose meaning is obvious. His family was originally German but obliged to emigrate; so was mine. He is of higher birth than you; so am I. He is the picture of arrogance; I am accused of arrogance. In your dream, he is your enemy but also a member of your inner circle; someone you lead, but someone who threatens you — and an Aryan, decidedly an Aryan. The conclusion is inescapable: you were dreaming of me, but you had to distort it, because you did not want to acknowledge that you regard me as a threat.'

'Carl,' said Freud slowly, 'I dreamt of Count Thun in 1898. That was more than a decade ago. You and I did not meet until 1907.'

The doors opened. The corridor was empty. Freud walked briskly out; we followed. I could not imagine what Jung was thinking or what his response would be. It was this: 'I know it! We dream what is to come as well as what has passed. Younger,' he exclaimed, his eyes unnaturally bright, 'you can confirm it!'

'I?'

'Yes, of course you. You were there. You saw the whole thing.' Suddenly Jung seemed to change his mind and addressed Freud again. 'Never mind. Your enuresis signifies ambition. It is a means of drawing attention to yourself — as you did just now, in the lobby. It appears whenever you feel you have an enemy, an opposite number, an un you must overcome. I am now that un. Hence your problem has reappeared.'

We reached Freud's room. He fished in his pocket for the key — a task uncomfortable for him at present. In the end, the key dropped to the floor. No one moved. Then Freud picked it up. When upright again, he said to Jung, 'I doubt very much I enjoy Joseph's gift of prophecy, but

I can tell you this: you are my heir. You will inherit psychoanalysis when I die, and you will become its leader even before that. I will see to it. I am seeing to it. I have said all this to you before. I have told the others; I say it now again. There is no one else, Carl. Do not doubt it.'

'Then tell me the rest of your Count Thun dream!' cried Jung. 'You have always said there was a part of that dream you did not reveal. If I am your heir, tell me. It will confirm my analysis; I am certain of it. What was it?'

Freud shook his head. I think he was smiling — ruefully, perhaps. 'My boy,' he said to Jung, 'there are some things even I cannot divulge. I should never have any authority again. Now leave me, both of you. I will join you in the dining room in half an hour.'

Jung turned without a word and strode away.

The Manhattan Bridge, nearing completion in the summer of 1909, was the last of the three great suspension bridges built across the East River to connect the island of Manhattan with what had been, until 1898, the City of Brooklyn. These bridges — the Brooklyn, the Williamsburg, the Manhattan — were, when constructed, the longest single spans in existence, extolled by Scientific American as the greatest engineering feats the world had ever known. Together with the invention of spun-steel cable, one particular technological innovation made them possible: the ingenious conceit of the pneumatic caisson.

The problem to which the caisson responded was this. The massive support towers for these bridges, necessary to hold up their suspension cables, had to rest on foundations built underwater, almost a hundred feet beneath the surface. These foundations could not be laid directly on the soft riverbed. Instead, layer upon layer of sand, silt, shale, clay, and boulder had to be dredged, broken, and sometimes dynamited until one reached bedrock. To perform such excavation underwater was universally regarded as impossible — until the idea of the pneumatic caisson was hit upon.

The caisson was basically an enormous wooden box. The Manhattan Bridge caisson, on the New York City side, had an area of seventeen thousand square feet. Its walls were made from countless planks of yellow pine lumber, bolted together to a thickness of over twenty feet and caulked with a million barrels of oakum, hot pitch, and varnish. The lower three feet of the caisson were reinforced with boiler plate, inside and out. The weight of the whole: over sixty million pounds.

A caisson had a ceiling but no man-made floor. Its floor was the riverbed itself. In essence, the pneumatic caisson was the largest diving bell ever built.

In 1907, the Manhattan Bridge caisson was sunk to the river bottom, water filling its internal compartments. On land, enormous steam engines were fired up, which, running day and night, pumped air through iron pipes down into the great box. The forced air, building up to enormous pressure, drove out all the water through boreholes drilled in the caisson's walls. An elevator shaft connected the caisson to a pier. Men would take this elevator down into the caisson, where they could breathe the pumped, compressed air.

There they had direct access to the riverbed and hence were able to perform the underwater construction work previously considered impossible: hammering the rock, shoveling the mud, dynamiting the boulders, laying the concrete. Debris was discharged through ingeniously devised compartments called windows, although one could not see through them. Three hundred men could work in the caisson at one time.

An invisible danger lay in wait for them there. The men who emerged from a day's work in the very first pneumatic caisson — employed for the Brooklyn Bridge — frequently began to feel a strange light-headedness. This was followed by a stiffening of their joints, then by a paralysis of the elbows and knees, then by an unendurable pain throughout the entire body. Doctors called the mysterious condition caisson disease. Workmen called it 'the bends,' because of the contorted posture into which its sufferers were driven. Thousands of workers had their health ruined by it, hundreds endured paralysis, and many died before it was discovered that slowing the climb back to the surface — forcing the men to spend time at intermediate stages as they ascended the shaft — prevented the disorder.

By 1909, the science of decompression had advanced impressively. Tables had been drawn up prescribing exactly how long a man needed to decompress, which depended on how much time he had spent down in the caisson. From these tables, the man preparing to enter the caisson just after midnight on August 31, 1909, knew he could spend fifteen minutes down below without requiring any decompression at all. He had no fear of the underwater descent.

He had made the trip many times. This trip, however, would be different in one respect. He would be alone.

He had driven one of his automobiles almost down to the river itself, navigating around machinery, lumber, tilting corrugated-tin shacks, fifty-foot rounds of steel cable, and piles of broken stone. The construction site was deserted, the night watchman had completed his final rounds, and the first crews of workmen would not arrive until dawn. The tower of the bridge, virtually finished, cast a shadow over his car in the moonlight, making him all but invisible from the street. The steam engines were still roaring, pumping air down to the caisson a hundred feet below and masking all other sound.

From the back of his car, he removed a large black trunk, which he carried onto the pier to the mouth of the caisson shaft. Another man would not have been able to manage the feat, but this man was strong, tall, and athletic. He knew how to hoist a heavy trunk over his back. It made an incongruous sight, since the man was wearing black tie and tails.

He unlocked the elevator and entered it, dragging the trunk in with him. Two jets of blue flame provided light. As the elevator made its journey downward, the roar of the steam engines became a distant throbbing. The darkness became cooler. There was a deep, dank smell of earth and salt. The man felt the pressure building in his inner ear. He negotiated the air lock without difficulty, opened the caisson hatch, forced the trunk down a ramp — it echoed monstrously as it fell — and descended to the wooden planks below.

Blue-flame gaslights also illuminated the caisson. They burned pure oxygen, providing enough light to work by while emitting neither smoke nor odor. In their unsteady glow, catlike shadows shifted on the ground and in the rafters. The man looked at his watch, went directly to one of the so-called windows, opened its inner hatch, and with a grunt pushed the trunk inside it. Resealing the window, he operated two pull chains hanging from the wall. The first opened the window's outer hatch. The second caused the window's compartment to rotate, dumping its contents — in this case, one heavy black trunk — into the river. With a different set of chains, he closed the outer hatch and activated an air pipe that flushed the river water from the compartment, making the window ready for the next user.

He was done. He looked at his watch: only five minutes had elapsed since he entered the caisson. Then he heard a piece of wood creaking.

Among the various sounds one can hear indoors in the nighttime, some are instantly recognizable. There is, for example, the unmistakable pattering of a small animal. There is the banging of a door in the wind. Then there is the sound of an adult human being shifting his weight or taking a step on a wooden floor: this was the sound the man had just heard.

He spun around and called out, 'Who's there?'

'It's only me, sir,' answered a voice, sounding falsely distant in the compressed air.

'Who is me?' said the man in black tie and tails.

'Malley, sir.' Out from the shadows where two joists intersected stepped a redheaded man, short but with the girth of a bear, muddy, unkempt, and smiling.

'Seamus Malley?'

'The one and only,' answered Malley. 'You won't fire me, will you, sir?'

'What the devil are you doing down here?' replied the taller man. 'Who else is with you?'

'Not a soul. It's just they have me working twelve hours of a Tuesday, sir, and then the morning shift on Wednesday.'

'You're spending the night here?'

'What's the point of going up at all, I ask, when by the time you're up it's only time to come down again?' Malley was a favorite among the workmen, known for his fine tenor, which he liked to exercise in the echoing chambers of the caisson, and his seemingly unlimited capacity to consume alcoholic potables of any kind. The latter talent had caused him trouble around the Malley household the day before yesterday, which, being a Sunday, was a time when no alcohol ought to have been consumed at all. His incensed wife told him not to show his face until he could show it sober the next Sunday. It was this injunction that, in truth, had obliged Malley to make his bed in the caisson. 'So I say to myself, Malley, just kip down here for the night, why don't you, and none the worse or the wiser.'

'Been watching me all this time, have you, Seamus?' asked the man.

'Never in life, sir. I was sleeping all the while,' said Malley, who shivered like a man who had been sleeping in a cold, damp place.

The man in black tie doubted this assertion very much, although it happened to be true. But true or not, it made no difference, because Malley had seen him now. 'Shame on me, Seamus,' he said, 'if I'm the man to fire you for such a thing. Don't you know my mother, God rest her soul, was Irish?'

'I didn't know it, sir.'

'Why, didn't she take me by the hand thirty years ago to see Parnell himself come off the ship, practically right above our heads, where we're standing at this moment?'

'You're a lucky man, sir,' Malley answered.

'I'll tell you what you need, Seamus, and that's a fifth of good Irish whiskey to keep you company down here, which I happen to have in my car. Why don't you come up with me and I'll give it to you, provided you share a drop first. Then you can come back and make yourself comfortable.'

'You're too good, sir, too good,' said Malley.

'Oh, stop your gabbing and come on then.' Ushering Malley up the ramp to the elevator, the man in black tie pulled the lever to begin their ascent. 'I'll be needing to charge you rent, don't you know It's only fair.'

'Why, I'd pay anything at all for the view alone,' replied Malley. 'We're going to miss the first holding stage, sir. You need to stop.'

'Not a bit of it,' said the taller man. 'You're coming straight back down in five minutes, Seamus. No need to stop if you go straight back down.'

'Is that it, sir?'

'That's it. It's all in the tables.' And the man in black tie actually pulled a copy of the decompression tables from his vest, waving them before Malley It was quite true: a man in the caisson could make a quick trip up and down without illness, provided he spent no more than a few minutes on the surface. 'All right: ready to hold your breath?'

'My breath?' Malley asked.

The man in black tie yanked down the elevator brake, jerking the cabin to a sudden stop. 'What are you thinking, man?' he cried. 'We're going straight up, I tell you. You've got to hold your breath from here clear to the top. You want to die of the bends?' They were about a third of the way up the shaft, some sixty-five feet below the surface. 'How long have you been down, fifteen hours?'

'Closer on to twenty, sir.'

'Twenty hours down, Seamus — you'd be paralyzed for sure, if you lived at all. I'll tell you what it is. You take a deep breath, like me, and you hold it for dear life. Don't let go. You'll feel a little pressure, but don't let go, no matter what. Are you ready?'

Malley nodded. The two men each swallowed an immense lungful of air. Then the man in black tie started the elevator once more. As they rose, Malley felt an increasing burden in his chest. The man in black tie felt no such pressure, because he was only pretending to hold his breath. In actuality, he was steadily but invisibly exhaling as the elevator made its way to the surface. Over the throbbing din of the steam engines, the sound of his breath escaping could not be heard.

Malley's chest began to ache. To indicate his discomfort, and his difficulty keeping in his breath, he pointed at his chest and mouth. The man in black tie shook his head and waved his forefinger, emphasizing how important it was that Malley not exhale. He beckoned Malley toward him, put his large hand over Malley's mouth and nose, closing off those passageways completely. He raised his eyebrows as if to ask Malley whether that was better. Malley nodded, grimacing. His face turned redder, his eyes began to bulge, and just as the elevator reached its terminus, he coughed involuntarily into the hand of the man with black tie. That hand was now covered with blood.

The human lung is surprisingly inelastic. It cannot stretch. At sixty-five feet below the earth's surface, when Malley took his last breath, the ambient pressure is approximately three atmospheres, which means that Malley took into his lungs three times the normal quantity of air. As the elevator ascended, this air expanded. His lungs quickly inflated beyond their capacity, like overstretched balloons. Soon the pleura in Malley's lungs — the tiny sacs that hold the air — began to burst, rapid-fire, one after the other. The released air invaded his pleural cavity — the space between chest and lung — causing a condition called pneumothorax, in which one of his lungs collapsed.

'Seamus, Seamus, you didn't exhale, did you?' They had reached the top, but the man in black tie made no move to open the elevator door.

'I swear I didn't,' Malley gasped. 'Mother of God. What's wrong with me?'

'You've lost a lung, is all,' replied the taller man. 'That won't kill you.'

'I need' — Malley collapsed to his knees — 'to lie down.'

'Lie down? No, man: we have to keep you standing, do you hear me?' The taller man seized Malley under the shoulders, hauled him upright, and propped him against the elevator wall. 'That's better.'

Like most gases trapped in a liquid, air bubbles in a man's bloodstream rise straight upward. Keeping Malley vertical ensured that the air bubbles still in Malley's lungs, forcing their way through his ruptured pleural capillaries, would proceed directly to his heart and from there to his coronary and carotid arteries.

'Thanks,' whispered Malley. 'Will I be all right?'

'We'll know any minute now,' said the man.

Malley gripped his head, which began to swim. The veins in his cheeks were showing blue. 'What's happening to me?' he asked.

'Well, I'd say you're having a stroke, Seamus.'

'Am I going to die?'

'I'll be honest with you, man: if I took us straight back down, right now, all the way down, I might just save you.' This was true. Recompression was the only way to save a man dying from decompression. 'But do you know what it is?' The man in black tie took his time, cleaning the blood from his hand with a fresh handkerchief before finishing: 'My mother wasn't Irish.'

Malley s mouth opened as if to speak. He looked at the man who had killed him. Then his head jerked back, his eyes glazed over, and he moved no more. The man in black tie calmly opened the elevator door. No one was there. He returned to his car, found a bottle of whiskey in the back, and returned to the elevator, where he placed the bottle next to the slumped body. Poor Malley's corpse would be discovered in a few hours, to be mourned as yet another victim of the caisson. A good man, his friends would agree, but a fool to have been spending nights down there, in a place unfit for man or beast. Why, some wondered, had he tried to come out in the middle of the night, and how could he have forgotten to stop at the holding stages? Must have been spooked as well as drunk. On the pier, no one would notice the red clay footprints left by the murderer. All the caisson men tracked the same stuff, and the outlines of the man's elegant shoes were soon obliterated by the random treading of a thousand heavy boots.