By the Time You Read This

45

THE LITTLE BRASS WHEEL gleamed as it rotated, and the tiny engine made the puffing sounds of a miniature locomotive. Frederick Bell had used a nail clipper to trim the wick of the tiny burner below the boiler and filled it with methyl hydrate. The cylindrical boiler was so small it held less than a half cup of water. All the brass parts shimmered in the window light, and the flywheel spun.

This stationary engine was the only memento he kept of his father—or rather, the only one he kept in plain sight. It stayed on his desk, to be started up occasionally when the doctor found himself in a contemplative mood.

He was in such a mood now, contemplating Melanie Greene. Bell was almost certain he had nudged the young woman over the edge. There’s nothing like a history of sexual abuse to bring on low self-esteem and depression. Getting her to talk about it, and to admit her own ancient ambiguous feelings about it, was just the most basic psychotherapy. His master stroke, of course, was the timing of his rejection. He had seen the trust in those green eyes, the yearning for acceptance. He was fairly sure she was now in the grip of a despair so deep she would no longer reach out for help. Today was the first day she hadn’t called since their last session. But it made him edgy not to be one hundred percent sure. He couldn’t begin to savour a victory until it was beyond doubt.

Playing with the little steam engine usually calmed him. It summoned his best memories of childhood, when his father had been teaching him his beloved facts of science. The steam engine presented opportunities to talk about Boyle’s law, momentum and the history of steam power in general. At such times his father had seemed, in his boy’s eyes, to be another Alexander Graham Bell—he even had the same dark hair and beard.

Sometimes, when he worked the little steam engine, he would have a complete change of heart about his negative therapy. He would resolve to help people recover, as he had in the beginning, help pull them back from the cliff’s edge instead of nudging them over. But it would only be a matter of two or three sessions, sometimes the very first after his new resolution, before he would shift back to his previous attitude.

“I hate them,” he muttered. He pressed a tiny brass lever and the engine emitted a cheerful toot. “I just hate them.”

He held the lever down until the whistle dwindled to a hiss and the wheel stopped turning. The engine was not calming him today, and he certainly wasn’t making any resolutions. He extinguished the little blue flame and set the engine on the bookcase next to the picture of his mother, a picture of her smiling in the backyard in one of her shirtwaist dresses, her hair still swept to one side in the style of the forties. The picture had been taken by an aunt just a week before his mother swallowed the pills that killed her and left her eighteen-year-old son to make out however he could.

No, no, even reveries about early childhood would not calm him today, not while he was waiting to find out if he had rid the earth of another useless whiner. It was important work, a kind of sanitation, really, but he only got real satisfaction out of getting them to do it themselves. He was enough of a psychiatrist to know why this was so, but the self-knowledge changed nothing. This of course was the dirty little secret of psychiatry: you could come to know exactly the genesis of your particular neurosis, obsession or fetish and still be no closer to being free of it.

No, the real satisfaction was getting these snivellers to remove themselves from the face of the earth. The world was better off, and he had committed no crime. Catherine Cardinal had not been at all satisfactory in that regard. He had had to resort to heroic measures with that one, and he hadn’t been the same since. It was the first time he had actually killed someone, and that way, he knew, lay madness, incarceration, death.

He did not see himself as a violent man, but Catherine Cardinal had driven him to it. All that insistence on love and art as the saving graces of her life. What life? Going to hospital every other year for months at a time? Living on lithium? How could she not see that death was the only cure for her? It would destroy the game if he no longer had the patience to let them kill themselves. If he resorted to such personal interventions, the law would be bound to catch up to him. Just his luck that his first hands-on victim should be the wife of a detective.

He had been careful to remain unseen. Through that all-but-abandoned parking lot and the vacant storefronts, he had moved like a shadow within shadow. Up the freight elevator and onto the roof, and not a soul to see him. Then it was done and he had left the note at the scene and removed the evidence.

He went to the cabinet where he kept his session recordings. He wanted to watch Dorn again. All right, his exit had been too spectacular, but it had been inevitable. A young man who was determined to come to no good, Dorn: a born pisser and moaner, always conceiving these passions for women who couldn’t care less. Left untreated, he would have gone on plaguing women with unwanted adoration, and friends with tales of his misery. Cut that one off at the knees and no mistake.

The moment he opened the cabinet, he saw that discs were missing, half a dozen at least. His first thought was that a patient had somehow learned of the camera and decided to steal some. But then he realized that the patients concerned—Perry Dorn, Leonard Keswick, Catherine Cardinal—were all dead. There were two discs missing for each of them.

“Dorothy!” He went out to the hall, calling her name. “Dorothy, where are you!”

Blood pounded in his temples. The hall seemed to narrow itself into a black tunnel. Somewhere a part of him recognized rage. I’m in a rage, he thought from a distance: the tunnel vision, the pounding pulse, the quivering in my legs, are the effects of rage. He couldn’t have suppressed it now even if he had wanted to. The threshold had been crossed, the release was thrilling.

He flung open the door to the kitchen. Dorothy had her hand on the back door, about to go out. She turned, and her eyes were two dark little holes of dread. Munch’s eyes. Dead Mother and Child.

“I think you have something of mine,” Bell said. His words throbbed as if they had pounding pulses of their own.

Dorothy gripped the doorknob. “You’re doing something wrong,” she said evenly. “I stood by you in Manchester when people started dying. I told myself, He must be right, it must be just that he has a difficult caseload, he tries to help people who are really beyond help, and it ends up looking bad.”

“What have you done with my discs?” Bell said.