The Interpretation of Murder

Chapter Six

Coroner Hugel's sunken cheeks, Detective Littlemore noticed on Tuesday morning, were looking even hollower than usual. The pouches below his eyes had pouches of their own, the dark circles their own circles. Littlemore felt sure his discoveries would boost the coroner's spirits.

'Okay, Mr Hugel,' said the detective, 'I went back to the Balmoral. Wait till you hear what I got.'

'You spoke with the maid?' Hugel asked immediately.

'Doesn't work there anymore,' answered the detective. 'She was fired.'

'I knew it!' the coroner exclaimed. 'Did you get her address?'

'Oh, I found her all right. But here's the first thing: I went back to Miss Riverford's bedroom to look at that molding on the ceiling – you know, the bowling-ball thing you said she was tied up to? You were right. There were rope threads on it.'

'Good. You secured them, I trust?' said Hugel.

'I got 'em. And the whole ball too,' said Littlemore, provoking an unpleasant look of foreboding on the coroner's face. The detective continued: 'I didn't think it looked very • strong, so I got up on the bed and gave it a good yank, and it broke right off.'

'You didn't think the ceiling looked very strong,' the coroner repeated, 'so you gave it a yank, and it broke. Excellent work, Detective.'

'Thanks, Mr Hugel.'

'Perhaps you could destroy the whole room next time. Is there any other evidence you damaged?'

'No,' answered Littlemore. 'I just don't get the way it broke off so easy. How could it hold her up?'

'Well, it obviously did.'

'There's more, Mr Hugel, something big. Two things.' Littlemore described the unknown man who left the Balmoral around midnight on Sunday carrying a black case. 'How about that, Mr Hugel?' asked the detective proudly. 'It could be him, right?'

'They're certain he wasn't a resident?'

'Positive. Never saw him before.'

'Carrying a bag, you say?' asked Hugel. 'In what hand?'

'Clifford didn't know.'

'You asked?'

'Sure did,' said Littlemore. 'Had to check the guy's dexterity.'

Hugel grunted dismissively. 'Well, it's not our man anyway.'

'Why not?'

'Because, Littlemore, our man has graying hair, and our man lives in that building.' The coroner grew animated.

'We know Miss Riverford had no regular visitors. We know she had no visitors from outside the building on Sunday night. How then did the murderer get into her apartment? The door was not forced. There is only one possibility. He knocked; she answered. Now, would a girl, living alone, open her door to just anyone? In the nighttime? To a stranger? I doubt it very much. But she would open it to a neighbor, someone who lived in the building – someone she was expecting, perhaps, someone to whom she had opened her door before.'

'A laundry guy!' said Littlemore.

The coroner stared at the detective.

'That's the other thing, Mr Hugel. Listen to this. I'm down in the basement of the Balmoral when I see this Chinaman tracking clay – red clay. I took a sample; it's the same clay I saw up in Miss Riverford's room, I'm sure of it. Maybe he's the killer.'

'A Chinaman,' said the coroner.

'I tried to stop him, but he got away. Laundry worker. Maybe this guy makes a laundry delivery to Miss Riverford on Sunday night. She opens the door for him, and he kills her. Then he goes back down to the laundry, and nobody's the wiser.'

'Littlemore,' said the coroner, taking a deep breath, 'the murderer was not a Chinese laundry boy. He is a wealthy man. We know that.'

'No, Mr Hugel, you figured he was wealthy because he strangled her with a fancy silk tie, but if you work in a laundry you clean silk ties all the time. Maybe this

Chinaman steals one from there and kills Miss Riverford with it.'

'With what motive?' asked the coroner.

'I don't know. Maybe he likes killing girls, like that guy in Chicago. Say, Miss Riverford comes from Chicago. You don't think -?'

'No, Detective, I don't. Nor do I think your Chinaman has anything to do with Miss Riverford's murder.'

'But the clay -'

'Forget the clay.'

'But the Chinaman ran when -'

'No Chinaman! Do you hear me, Littlemore? No Chinaman figures in any way in this murder. The killer is at least six feet tall. He is white: the hairs I found on her body are Caucasian. The maid – the maid is the key. What did she tell you?'

I got to breakfast with about fifteen minutes to spare before I was to call on Miss Acton. Freud was just sitting down. Brill and Ferenczi were already at table, Brill with three empty plates in front of him and at work on a fourth. I had told him yesterday that Clark would pay for his breakfast. He was evidently making up for lost time.

'Now this is America,' he said to Freud. 'You begin with toasted oats in sugar and cream, then hot leg of lamb with French-fried potatoes, a basket of raised biscuits with fresh butter, and finally buckwheat cakes with syrup tapped from Vermont maples. I am in heaven.'

'I am not,' Freud replied. He was apparently in some digestive distress. Our food, he said, was too heavy for him.

'For me too,' complained Ferenczi, who had nothing but a cup of tea before him. He added unhappily, 'I think it was mayonnaise salad.'

'Where is Jung?' asked Freud.

'I haven't any idea,' answered Brill. 'But I do know where he went Sunday night.'

'Sunday night? He went to bed Sunday night,' said Freud.

'Oh, no, he didn't,' Brill replied, in what was evidently meant to be a tantalizing tone. 'And I know whom he was with. Here, I'll show you. Look at this.'

From below his seat, Brill withdrew a thick sheaf of papers, wrapped in rubber bands, perhaps three hundred pages. The top page read, Selected Papers on Hysteria and Other Psychoneuroses by Sigmund Freud, translation and preface by A. A. Brill. 'Your first book in English,' said Brill, handing the manuscript to Freud with a glowing pride I had never seen him reveal before. 'It will be a sensation, you'll see.'

'I am overjoyed, Abraham,' said Freud, returning the manuscript. 'Really I am. But you were telling us about Jung.'

Brill's face fell. He rose from his seat, lifted his chin, and declared haughtily, 'So that is how you treat my life's work of the last twelve months. Some dreams do not require interpretation; they require action. Good-bye.'

Then he sat down again.

'Sorry, don't know what came over me,' he said. 'Thought

I was Jung for a moment.' Brill's rendition of Jung – which had been remarkable – put Ferenczi in stitches but left Freud unmoved. Clearing his throat, Brill directed our attention to the name of his publisher, Smith Ely Jelliffe, on the manuscript's tide page. 'Jelliffe runs the Journal of Nervous Disease,' said Brill. 'He's a doctor, rich as Croesus, very well connected, and another convert to the cause, thanks to me. By God, I will make this Gomorrah a very Eden for psychoanalysis; you'll see. Anyway, our friend Jung had a secret rendezvous with Jelliffe on Sunday night.'

It turned out that Jelliffe, when Brill picked up the manuscript from him this morning, had mentioned having Jung to dinner at his apartment on Sunday night. Jung had told us nothing about such a meeting. 'Apparently their chief topic of conversation was the location of Manhattan's best brothels, but listen to this,' Brill continued. 'Jelliffe has asked Jung to give a series of lectures on psychoanalysis next week at Fordham University, the Jesuit school.'

'But that is excellent news!' Freud exclaimed.

'Is it?' asked Brill. 'Why Jung, rather than you?'

'Abraham, I am giving a lecture every day in Massachusetts beginning Tuesday of next week. I couldn't possibly lecture in New York at the same rime.'

'But why the secrecy? Why conceal his meeting with Jelliffe?'

To this question, none of us had an answer. Freud, however, was unconcerned, commenting that there was undoubtedly a good reason for Jung's reticence.

All this time, I had been holding Brill's thick manuscript. Having read the first couple of pages, I turned to the next and was surprised by the sight of an almost completely blank sheet. On it were only five lines of print: centered, italicized, capitalized. It was a biblical verse of some kind.

'What's this?' I asked, displaying the page.

Ferenczi took the page from my hand and read as follows:

Take away the foreskins of your heart, ye men of Jerusalem: lest my fury come forth like fire, and burn that none can quench it, because of the evil of your doings.

'Jeremiah, no?' Ferenczi added, demonstrating a knowledge of scripture considerably superior to my own. 'What is Jeremiah doing in your hysteria book?'

Odder still, at the bottom of the page – which Ferenczi now placed in the center of our table – was the ink- stamped image of a face. It was a wizened Oriental sage of some kind, with a turban on his head, a long nose, a longer beard, and wide-open, mesmerizing eyes.

'A Hindoo?' asked Ferenczi.

'Or an Arab?' I suggested.

Oddest of all, the next page of the manuscript was just the same – blank but for the biblical passage in the center – although there was no wide-eyed, turbaned face stamped on it. I riffled through the remaining pages. All were the same, minus the face.

'Is this a joke, Brill?' said Freud.

Judging by the look on Brill's face, it was not.

Detective Littlemore was sorely disappointed by the coroner's dismissal of his discoveries, but he allowed Hugel to change the subject back to Miss Riverford's maid, who had also provided interesting information.

'She's real bad off, Mr Hugel; I wish I could do something for her,' said the detective. In fact, he had: finding Betty reluctant to speak with him at first, Littlemore had taken her to a soda fountain. When he told her he knew she had been let go, she burst out about how unfair it was. Why had they fired her? She hadn't done anything. Some of the other girls stole from the apartments – why didn't they fire one of them? And what would she do now? It turned out that Betty's father had passed away the year before. For the last two months, Betty had been supporting her whole family – her mother and three little brothers – with her wages from the Balmoral.

'What did she tell you, Detective?' asked the coroner, biting his lip.

'Betty says she didn't like going into Miss Riverford's apartment. She said it was haunted. Twice she was sure she heard a baby crying, but there wasn't any baby; the apartment would be empty. She says Miss Riverford was strange. Just shows up one day about four weeks ago. No moving trucks; no nothing. The apartment was furnished before she got there. Real quiet type, very private. Never any mess. Always made her own bed and kept her things just so – one of her closets was always locked. She tried to give Betty a pair of earrings once. Betty asked were they real – real diamonds, that is – and when Miss Riverford said yes, Betty wouldn't take them. But Betty almost never saw her. Betty worked nights for a while, and she saw Miss Riverford a couple of times then. Otherwise she was always up and out of the apartment before seven, when Betty got there. One of the doormen told me Miss Riverford left the building a couple of times before six. What's that mean, Mr Hugel?'

'It means,' answered the coroner, 'you are going to send a man to Chicago.'

'To talk to the family?'

'Correct. What did the maid tell you about the bedroom when she first discovered the body?'

'The thing is, Betty doesn't remember that part too well. All she can remember is Miss Riverford's face.'

'Did she see anything near the dead girl or lying on top of her?'

'I asked her, Mr Hugel. She can't remember.'

'Nothing?'

'She just remembers Miss Riverford's eyes, open and staring.'

'Weak little idiot.'

'You wouldn't say that if you talked to her,' he said. Littlemore was taken aback. 'How do you figure something changing anyway?'

'What?'

'You're saying something in the room changed from when Betty first went in to when you got there. But I thought they locked the apartment right away and put that butler guy in the hall to keep everybody out until you got there.'

'I thought so too,' the coroner replied, pacing the short length of his cramped office. 'That's what we were told.'

'So why do you think someone got in the room?'

'Why?' repeated Hugel, scowling. 'You want to know why? Very well, Mr Littlemore. Follow me.'

The coroner strode out the door. The detective followed him – down three flights of old stairs and through a maze of peeling corridors, eventually emerging in the morgue. The coroner unlocked a vaulted door. When he opened it, Littlemore felt the blast of stale, freezing air, then saw rows of cadavers on wooden shelves, some naked and stretched out for all to see, others covered by sheets. He could not help looking at their privates, which repulsed him.

'No one else,' announced the coroner, 'would have examined her body closely enough to see this clue. No one.' He strode to the back of the chamber where a body lay on the farthest shelf. A white sheet covered it, on which was written Riverford, E.: 29.8.09. 'Now look at her carefully, Detective, and tell me exactly what you see.'

The coroner threw back the sheet with a flourish. Littlemore's eyes went wide, but Hugel looked even more astonished than the dectective. Beneath the sheet lay not Elizabeth Riverford's corpse, but that of a. black-toothed, slack-skinned old man.

I took the elevator to Miss Acton's floor – and then remembered that I had to go back to my own first, to get paper and pens. The bizarre biblical passage in his manuscript had affected Brill deeply. He seemed actually frightened. He said he was going straight back to Jelliffe, his publisher, for an explanation; I felt there might be something he wasn't telling us.

I had expected Freud to be present at my initial sessions with Miss Acton. Instead, he instructed me to report to him afterward. His presence, he felt, would disrupt the transference.

The transference is a psychoanalytic phenomenon. Freud discovered it by accident, and much to his surprise. Patient after patient reacted to analysis by worshiping him – or occasionally by hating him. At first he tried to ignore these feelings, viewing them as unwelcome and unruly intrusions into the therapeutic relationship. Over time, however, he discovered how crucial they were, to both the patient's illness and the cure. The patient was reenacting, inside the analyst's office, the very same unconscious conflicts that caused the symptoms, transferring to the doctor the suppressed desires that lay at the heart of the illness. This was not fortuitous: the entire disease of hysteria, Freud had found, consisted of an individual's transferring to new persons, or sometimes even to objects, a set of buried wishes and emotions formed in childhood but never discharged. By dissecting this phenomenon with the patient – by bringing the transference to light and working it through – analysis makes, the unconscious conscious and removes the cause of the illness.

Thus the transference turned out to be one of Freud's most important discoveries. Would I ever have an idea of comparable importance? Ten years ago, I thought I already had. On December 31, 1899, I excitedly announced it to my father, actually interrupting him in his study a few hours before the guests would arrive for the New Year's Eve dinner party my mother always threw. He was quite surprised and, I suppose, irritated that I would bother him at his work, although of course he didn't say so. I told him I had made a discovery of potentially great moment and asked permission to inform him. He tilted his head. 'Proceed,' he said.

Since the dawn of the modern age, I argued, a peculiar fact held true of all man's supreme revolutionary bursts of genius, whether in art or in science. Every one of them had occurred at the turn of a century and – more specifically still – in the first decade of the new century.

In painting, poetry, sculpture, natural science, drama, literature, music, physics – in each one of these fields – which man and which work, above all others, has the best claim to world-altering genius, the kind of genius that changes the course of history? In painting, the cognoscenti uniformly point to the Scrovegni Chapel, where Giotto reintroduced three-dimensional figuration to the modern world. He painted those frescoes between 1303 and 1305. In verse, surely the crown belongs to Dante's Inferno, the first great work written in the vernacular, begun soon after the poet's banishment from Florence in 1302. In sculpture, there is only one possibility, Michelangelo's David, carved from a single block of marble in 1501. That same year marked the fundamental revolution of modern science, for it was then that a certain Nicolaus of Torún traveled to Padua, ostensibly to study medicine but secretly to continue the astronomical observations from which he had glimpsed a forbidden truth; we know him today as Copernicus. In literature, the choice has to be the grandsire of all novels, Don Quixote, who first tilted at windmills in 1604. In music, none will dispute Beethoven's pathbreaking symphonic genius: he composed his First in 1800, the defiant Eroica in 1803, the Fifth by 1807.

This was the case I made to my father. It was juvenile, I know, but I was seventeen. I supposed it a great thing to be alive at the turn of a century. I predicted a wave of groundbreaking works and ideas in the next few years. And what would one not give to be alive at the turn of the millennium a hundred years hence!

'You are certainly – enthusiastic' was my father's phlegmatic reply. His only reply. I had made the mistake of showing excitement. Enthusiastic was for my father a term of utmost deprecation.

But my enthusiasm was vindicated. In 1905, an unknown Swiss patent agent of German-Jewish extraction produced a theory he called relativity. Within twelve months, my professors at Harvard were saying that this Einstein had changed our ideas of space and time forever. In art, I concede, nothing happened. In 1903, the crowd at St. Botolph's made a great fuss over a Frenchman's water lilies, but these proved to be the work of an artist who was merely losing his eyesight. When it came, however, to man's understanding of himself, my predictions were again fulfilled. Sigmund Freud published his Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. My father would have scoffed, but I am convinced that Freud too will have changed our thinking forever. After Freud, we will never look at ourselves or others in the same way again.

My mother was always 'protecting' us from my father. This was an irritant to me; I didn't need it. My elder brother did, but her protection in his case was quite ineffectual. What an advantage to come second: I saw it all. Not that I was favored, but by the time my father came around to me, I had learned to be impenetrable, and he could do no serious damage. I did have an Achilles' heel, however, which he eventually found. It was Shakespeare.

My father never said aloud that my fascination with Shakespeare was excessive, but he made his opinion clear: there was something unwholesome about my taking a greater interest in a fiction, especially Hamlet, than in reality itself, and something arrogant as well. Once only did he give voice to this sentiment. When I was thirteen, thinking no one home, I delivered Hamlet's What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her? Possibly I sawed the air a little hard on bloody, bawdy villain ; conceivably I was a little earsplitting on Oh vengeance! or Fie upon 't! Foh! My father, unbeknownst to me, witnessed the whole thing. When I was done, he cleared his throat and asked what Hamlet was to me, or I to Hamlet, that I should weep for him?

Needless to say, I had not wept. I have never cried at all, in conscious memory. My father's point, if not solely to embarrass me, was that my devotion to Hamlet could mean nothing in the scope of things: nothing in my future, nothing in the world. He wanted to make me understand this early on. He succeeded and, what's more, I knew he was right.

Yet that knowledge did not impair my devotion to Shakespeare. It will have been noticed that I left the poet of Avon off my list of world-changing geniuses. I also left him off the list when I made the case to my father in 1899. The omission was strategic. I wanted to see if my father might take the bait. It would have appealed to him to use my 'beloved Shakespeare,' as my father used to refer to him, against me. He was far too subtle to cite a Dickens or a Tolstoy: he would have seen at once that I would call them classic mid-century giants, masters of existing forms rather than inventors of new ones. But he also would have known that I could never deny the tide of revolutionary genius to Shakespeare, who might thus have been presented as an instant, devastating rebuttal of my argument.

Perhaps my father smelled the trap. Perhaps he knew his history better than I expected. At any rate he didn't ask, so I didn't get to tell him that Hamlet was written in 1600.

Nor did I get a chance to point out that I was hardly the only one impassioned about Shakespeare. Men were once ready to die over Hamlet. My father did not know it – indeed, nearly everyone has forgotten it – but there was once a riot over Hamlet even here in the uncultured United States. Only sixty years ago, the storied American actor Edwin Forrest toured England, where he saw the famous William Macready, the aristocratic British tragedian, playing the Prince of Denmark. Forrest volubly expressed his disgust. According to Forrest, who was of muscular build and haled from an impoverished, democratic upbringing, Macready's Hamlet pranced across the stage in effete, mincing steps absurd in themselves and degrading to the noble prince.

So began a public and escalating quarrel between these two international celebrities. Forrest was driven from the boards in England, and when Macready came to America the favor was returned. Eggs of doubtful purity, old shoes, copper coins, and even chairs were catapulted from audience to stage. The culmination of the quarrel took place in front of the old Astor Place Opera House in Manhattan on May 7, 1849, when fifteen thousand belligerents gathered to disrupt a Macready performance. The inexperienced mayor of New York, who had taken office only the week before, called up the militia, and the order was eventually given to open fire on the crowd. Some twenty or thirty men died that night.

And all for nothing, my father would have said: for Hamlet. But that is how it always is. Men care most about that which is least real. Medicine, to me, stood for reality. Nothing I did before medical school seems real any longer; it was all play. That is why fathers have to die: to make the world real for their sons.

It is the same with the transference: the patient forms an attachment to the doctor of the most strenuously emotional nature. A female patient will weep for her doctor; she will offer herself to him; she will be ready to die for him. But it is all a fiction, a chimera. In reality, her feelings have nothing to do with the doctor, onto whose person she is projecting some violent, roiling affect properly directed elsewhere. The grossest blunder an analyst can make is to mistake these artifactual feelings, whether seductive or hateful, for reality. So I steeled myself as I strode down the corridor to Miss Acton's room.

Chapter Seven

The old woman let me in to Miss Acton's suite, calling out, 'Young doctor's here!'

The girl was perched on a sofa under the window, one leg tucked beneath her, reading what appeared to be a mathematics textbook. She looked up but did not greet me – understandable, since she could not speak. A chandelier hung from the ceiling, its teardrop crystals trembling slightly, perhaps an effect of the underground trains rumbling far below us.

Miss Acton was simply attired in a white dress with blue trim. She wore no jewelry. Around her neck, just above a delicate clavicle, was a scarf the color of the sky. Given the summer heat, there could be only one explanation for the scarf: the bruises on her throat would still have been visible, and she wished to conceal them.

Her appearance was so different from the night before that I might have failed to recognize her. Her long hair, a tangle last night, was now perfectly smooth and shining, gathered in a long braid. Shivering uncontrollably yesterday, she was today a picture of grace, her chin held high over her long neck. Only her lips remained slightly swollen where she had been struck.

From my black bag I removed several notebooks, along with a variety of pens and inks. These were not for myself but for Miss Acton, so she could communicate with me by writing. Following Freud's advice, I never took notes during an analytic session but transcribed the conversation from memory afterward.

'Good morning, Miss Acton,' I said. 'These are for you.'

'Thank you,' she said. 'Which one shall I use?'

'Whichever is – ' I began, before the obvious fact took hold. 'You can speak.'

'Mrs Biggs,' she said, 'will you pour the doctor some tea?'

I declined the tea. To the annoyance I felt at having been taken by surprise was now added the realization that I was a doctor capable of resenting a patient for improving without my assistance. 'Have you also recovered your memory?' I asked.

'No. But your friend, the old doctor, said it would all come back naturally, didn't he?'

'Dr Freud said your voice was likely to come back naturally, Miss Acton, not your memory.' This was a strange thing for me to say, given that I wasn't at all sure I had it right.

'I hate Shakespeare,' she replied.

She kept her eyes on mine, but I saw what had prompted this inconsequent remark. My copy of Hamlet was poking out of the stack of notebooks I had offered her. I retrieved the play, putting it back in my bag. I was tempted to ask why she hated Shakespeare but thought better of it. 'Shall we begin your treatment, Miss Acton?'

Sighing like a patient who had seen too many doctors, she turned and looked out the window, offering her back to me. Evidently the girl thought I was going to use my stethoscope on her or perhaps examine her wounds. I informed her that we were only going to talk.

She exchanged a skeptical glance with Mrs Biggs. 'What sort of treatment is that, Doctor?' she asked.

'It is called psychoanalysis. It's very simple. I must ask your servant to excuse us. Then, if you will be so good as to lie down, Miss Acton, I will ask you questions. You need only say whatever comes into your mind in response. Please don't be concerned if what occurs to you seems irrelevant or unresponsive or even impolite. Just say the first thing that comes to mind, whatever it is.'

She blinked at me. 'You are joking.'

'Not at all.' It took several minutes to overcome the girl's hesitation – and then several more to overcome her servant's declaration that she had never heard of such a thing – but at last Mrs Biggs was persuaded to go and Miss Acton to recline on her sofa. She adjusted her scarf, straightened the skirt of her dress, and looked appropriately uncomfortable. I asked if the injuries to her back troubled her; she said no. Positioning myself on a chair out of her sight, I began. 'Can you tell me what you dreamt last night?'

'I beg your pardon?'

'I am sure you heard me, Miss Acton.'

'I don't see what my dreams have to do with it.'

'Our dreams,' I explained, 'are composed of fragments from the previous day's experiences. Any dream you recall may help us recover your memory.'

'What if I don't want to?' she asked.

'You had a dream you would prefer not to describe?'

'I didn't say that,' she said. 'What if I don't want to remember? You all assume I want to remember.'

'I assume you don't want to remember. If you wanted to remember, you would.'

'What is that supposed to mean?' She sat up, glaring at me with undisguised hostility. As a rule, I am not often hated by people I have only recently met; this case appeared to be an exception. 'You think I am pretending?'

'Not pretending, Miss Acton. Sometimes we don't want to remember events because they are too painful. So we shut them out, especially childhood memories.'

'I am not a child.'

'I know that,' I said. 'I meant you may have memories from years ago that you are keeping out of your consciousness.'

'What are you talking about? I was attacked yesterday, not years ago.'

'Yes, and that is why I have asked you about your dreams last night.'

She looked at me suspiciously, but with considerable cajoling I induced her to lie down again. Gazing at the ceiling, she said, 'Do you ask your other female patients to describe their dreams, Doctor?'

'Yes.'

'How entertaining that must be,' she remarked. 'But what if their dreams are very dull? Do they invent more interesting ones?'

'Please don't be concerned about that.'

'About what?'

'About your dreams being dull,' I answered.

'I didn't have any dreams. You must adore Ophelia.'

'I'm sorry?'

'For her docility. All of Shakespeare's women are fools, but Ophelia is the worst.'

This took me aback. I suppose I always have adored Ophelia. In fact, everything I know of women, I feel I learned from Shakespeare. Miss Acton was obviously changing the subject, and while one can of course be waylaid, it is sometimes useful in analysis to play along with these evasions, since they often lead back to the crux of the matter. 'What is your objection to Ophelia?' I asked.

'She kills herself because her father died – her stupid, pointless father. Would you kill yourself if your father died?'

'My father did die.'

Her hand shot to her mouth. 'Forgive me.'

'And I did kill myself,' I added. 'I don't see what's so unusual about it.'

She smiled.

'When you think about yesterday's events, Miss Acton, what comes to mind?'

'Nothing comes to mind,' she said. 'I believe that's what it means to have amnesia.'

The girl's resistance did not surprise me. The one piece of advice Freud had given me was not to be put off too easily. In hysterical amnesia, some deeply forbidden and long-forgotten episode from the patient's past, stirred into life by a recent event, presses at her consciousness, which in turn fights back with all its strength to keep out the inadmissible memory. Psychoanalysis takes the side of memory against the forces of suppression; it therefore provokes immediate and sometimes intense hostility.

'There is never nothing in one's mind,' I said. 'What is in yours, at this moment?'

'Right now?'

'Yes: don't reflect; just speak it.'

'All right. Your father didn't die. He committed suicide.'

There was a momentary silence. 'How did you know that?'

'Clara Banwell told me.'

'Who?'

'George Banwell's wife,' she said. 'Do you know Mr Banwell?'

'No.'

'He is a friend of my father's. Clara took me to the horse show last year. We saw you there. Were you at Mrs Fish's ball last night?'

I acknowledged the fact.

'You are wondering if my family was invited,' she said, 'but you are afraid to ask, for fear that we were not.'

'No, Miss Acton. I was wondering how Mrs Banwell knew the circumstances of my father's death.'

'Is it awkward when people know?'

'Are you trying to make things awkward?'

'Clara says all the girls find it fascinating – your having a father who killed himself. They think it gives you soul. The answer is that we were invited, but that I would never go to one of your balls in a thousand years.'

'Really?'

'Yes, really. They are sickening.'

'Why?'

'Because they are so – so tiresome.'

'They are sickeningly tiresome?'

'Do you know what a debutante is made to do, Doctor? First, together with her mother, she must call on all her mother's acquaintance – perhaps a hundred houses. I doubt you can imagine how excruciating that is. In every house, the women invariably comment on how "grown up" you look, by which they mean something – quite disgusting. When the grand day arrives, you are exhibited like a talking animal on whom conversational open season has been declared. Then you are forced to endure a cotillion at which every man believes he has a right to make love to you, no matter who he is, no matter how old, no matter how bad his breath. And I haven't even gotten to having to dance with them. I'm starting college this month; I will never come out.'

I chose not to respond to this disquisition, which on the whole seemed quite persuasive. Instead I said, 'Tell me what happens when you try to remember.'

'What do you mean, "what happens"?'

'I want you to tell me whatever thought or image or feeling comes to you when you try to remember what happened yesterday.'

She took a deep breath. 'Where the memory should be, there is a darkness instead. I don't know how else to describe it:

'Are you there, in the darkness?'

'Am I there?' Her voice quieted. 'I think so.'

'Is anything else there?'

'A presence.' She shuddered. 'A man.'

'What does the man make you think of?'

'I don't know. It makes my heart beat faster.'

'As if you had something to fear?'

She swallowed. 'To fear? Let me think. I have been attacked in my own house. The man who attacked me has not been caught. They do not even know who it was. They believe he may yet be watching my house, planning to kill me if I return. And your penetrating question is whether I have something to fear?'

I should have been more sympathetic, but I decided to loose the one arrow I had. 'This was not the first time you lost your voice, Miss Acton.'

She frowned. I noticed, for some reason, the graceful oblique lines of her chin and profile. 'Who told you that?'

'Mrs Biggs told the police yesterday.'

'That was three years ago,' she replied, coloring slightly. 'It is absolutely unconnected to anything.'

'You have nothing to be ashamed of, Miss Acton.'

'I have nothing to be ashamed of?'

I heard the emphasis on I but could not decipher it. 'We are not responsible for our feelings,' I replied. 'Therefore no feeling can cause us shame.'

'That is the least perceptive remark I have ever heard in my life.'

'Oh, really?' I answered. 'What about when I asked if you had something to fear?'

'Of course feelings can cause people shame. It happens all the time.'

'Are you ashamed of what happened when you lost your voice the first time?'

'You have no idea what happened,' she said. Although she didn't sound it, she seemed suddenly fragile.

'That is why I am asking.'

'Well, I am not going to tell you,' she replied, and rose from the sofa. 'This is not medicine. It is – it is prying. ' She raised her voice. 'Mrs Biggs? Mrs Biggs, are you there? 'The door flew open, and Mrs Biggs bustled in. She must have been in the corridor all along, no doubt with her ear to the keyhole. 'Dr Younger,' Miss Acton addressed me, 'I am going out to buy a few things, since no one seems to know how long I shall be staying here. I'm sure you can find your way back to your own room.'

The mayor made Coroner Hugel wait an hour in his anteroom. Impatient under ordinary conditions, Hugel looked irate now. 'It is obstruction in the first degree,' he cried out, when finally admitted into Mayor McClellan's office. 'I demand an investigation.'

George Brinton McClellan, Jr. – son of the famous Civil War general – was the most intellectually accomplished and forward-thinking man ever to have held the office of mayor of New York City. In 1909, only a handful of Americans were recognized as authorities on Italian history; McClellan was one of them. At forty-three, he had already been a newspaper editor, lawyer, author, congressman, lecturer on European history at Princeton University, honorary member of the American Society of Architects, and mayor of the nation's largest city. When the aldermen of New York City passed a measure in 1908 prohibiting women from smoking in public, McClellan vetoed it.

His hold on the mayoralty, however, was tenuous. The next election was less than nine weeks away, and although the candidates had not been officially named, McClellan still had no offer of nomination from any major party or syndicate. He had made two potentially fatal political mistakes! The first was having in 1905 narrowly defeated William Randolph Hearst, who ever since had filled his newspapers with sensational accounts of McClellan's shameless corruption. The second was having broken with Tammany Hall, which hated him for his incorruptibility. Tammany Hall ran the Democratic Party in New York City, and the Democrats ran the city. It was a rewarding arrangement: the Tammany leadership had unburdened the city of at least $500 million over the years. McClellan had originally been a Tammany nominee, but once elected he refused to make the brazen patronage appointments demanded of him. He ousted the most notoriously corrupt officials and brought charges against many others. He hoped to wrest control of the party from Tammany, but in this goal he had not yet succeeded.

On the mayor's walnut desk, in addition to a copy of all fifteen of the city's major newspapers, was a set of blueprints. These depicted a soaring suspension bridge, anchored by two gigantic but marvelously thin towers. Streetcars were shown traversing an upper deck, while below were six lanes of horse, automobile, and rail traffic. 'Do you know, Hugel,' said the mayor, 'you are the fifth person today who has demanded an investigation of one thing or another?'

'Where did the body go?' Hugel replied. 'Did it get up and walk away on its two feet?'

'Look at this,' the mayor replied, gazing at the blueprints. 'This is the Manhattan Bridge. It has cost thirty millions to build. I will open it this year, if it is the last thing I do in office. This arch on the New York side is a perfect replica of the St. Denis portal in Paris, only twice the size. A century from now, this bridge -'

'Mayor McClellan, the Riverford girl -' 'I know about the Riverford girl,' McClellan said with sudden authority. He looked Hugel full in the face: 'What am I supposed to tell Banwell? What is he to tell the girl's wretched family? Answer me that. Of course there should have been an investigation; you should have completed it long ago.'

'I?' asked the coroner. 'Long ago?'

'How many bodies have we lost in the past six months, Hugel, including the two unaccounted for after we repaired the leak? Twenty? You know as well as I do where they are going.'

'You are not suggesting that I -'

'Of course not,' said the mayor. 'But someone on your staff is selling our cadavers to the medical schools. I am told they are worth five dollars a head.'

'Am I to blame,' responded Hugel, 'with the conditions I am given – no protection, no guards, the corpses piling up, no room for them all, sometimes rotting before they can be disposed of? Every month I have reported on the humiliating conditions at the morgue. But you leave me in that rabbit warren.'

'I am sorry for the state of the morgue,' said McClellan. 'No one could have managed half so well as you have, given the resources. But you have turned a blind eye to this stealing of cadavers, and I am about to pay the price for it. You will interrogate every member of your staff. You will contact every medical school in the city. I want that body found.'

'This body is not at a medical school,' the coroner objected. 'I had already performed the autopsy. I had ventilated the lungs, for God's sake, to confirm asphyxiation.'

'What of it?'

'No medical school wants a cadaver after an autopsy. You want your body intact.'

'So the thieves made a mistake.'

'There was no mistake,' said the coroner vehemently. 'The man who murdered her stole her body.'

'Control yourself, Hugel,' said the mayor. 'You are wild.'

'I am in perfect control.'

'I don't take your meaning. You are saying that Miss Riverford's murderer broke into the morgue last night and absconded with his victim's corpse?'

'Precisely,' said Hugel.

'Why?'

'Because there is evidence on the girl, on her body, evidence he did not want us to have.'

'What evidence?'

The coroner's jaws were working so hard his temples had turned a shade of plum. 'The evidence is – it is – I am not yet sure what it is. That is why we must get the body back!'

'Hugel,' said the mayor, 'you have locks on the morgue, do you not?'

'Certainly.'

'Good. Was the lock broken this morning? Was there any evidence of a burglary?'

'No,' Hugel allowed grudgingly. 'But anyone with a decent skeleton key -'

'Mr Coroner,' said McClellan, 'here is what you will do: make it known to your people immediately that there will be a fifteen-dollar reward to whoever "finds" the Riverford girl at one of the medical schools. Twenty-five dollars if they find her today. That will bring her back. Now: you will excuse me; I'm very busy. Good day.' As Hugel reluctantly turned to leave, the mayor suddenly looked up from his desk. 'Wait a moment. Wait a moment. Did you say the Riverford girl was asphyxiated?'

'Yes,' said the coroner. 'Why?'

'How asphyxiated?'

'By ligature.'

'She was garroted?' asked McClellan.

'Yes. Why?'

The mayor ignored the coroner's question for a second time. 'Were there any other wounds on her body?'

'It was all in my report,' answered the aggrieved Hugel, to whom the knowledge that the mayor had not read his report was a fresh indignity. 'The girl was whipped. There were lacerations on the posterior, spine, and chest. In addition, she was cut twice, by an extremely sharp blade, at the intersection of the S-two and L-two dermatomes.'

'Where? In English, Hugel.'

'On the upper inner thigh of each leg.'

'In the name of God,' replied the mayor.

I went down for a late breakfast, trying to sort out my encounter with Miss Acton. Jung was there, reading an American newspaper. I joined him. The others had set off for the Metropolitan Museum. Jung stayed behind, he explained, because he was going to pay a call this morning on Dr Onuf, a neuropsychiatrist at Ellis Island.

It was my first time alone with Jung. He appeared to be in one of his animated, outgoing moods. He had slept all yesterday afternoon, he said, and the long nap had done him a world of good. Indeed, the pallor that had worried me yesterday was visibly improved. His opinion of America, he told me, was also improving. 'Americans merely lack literature,' he said, 'not all culture.'

Jung meant this, I think, as a compliment. Nevertheless, wanting to show that Americans were not entirely illiterate, I described to him the story of the Astor Place Shakespeare riot.

'So the Americans wanted a muscular American Hamlet,' Jung mused, shaking his head. 'Your story confirms my point. A masculine Hamlet is a contradiction in terms. As my great-grandfather used to say, Hamlet represents man's feminine side: the intellectual, the inward soul, sensitive enough to see the spiritual world but not strong enough to bear the burden it imposes. The challenge is to do both: to hear the voices of the other world but live in this one – to be a man of action.'

I was puzzled by the 'voices' Jung referred to – perhaps the unconscious? – but delighted to find he had an opinion about Hamlet. 'You are describing Hamlet almost exactly as Goethe did,' I said. 'That was Goethe's explanation of Hamlet's inability to act.'

'I believe I said it was my great-grandfather's view,' Jung replied, sipping his coffee.

It took me a moment. 'Goethe was your greatgrandfather?'

'Freud prizes Goethe above all poets,' was Jung's reply. 'Jones, by contrast, calls him a dithyrambist. Can you imagine? Only an Englishman. I cannot understand what Freud sees in him.' The Jones to whom Jung referred was surely Ernest Jones, Freud's British follower, now living in Canada and expected to join our party tomorrow. I had concluded that Jung meant to avoid my question, but then he added, 'Yes, I am Carl Gustav Jung the third; the first, my grandfather, was Goethe's son. It is well known. The allegations of murder were of course ridiculous.'

'I didn't know Goethe was accused of murder.'

'Goethe – certainly not,' Jung answered indignantly. 'My grandfather. Evidently I resemble him in every way. They arrested him for murder, but it was a pretext. He wrote a murder novel, though, The Suspect – quite good – about an innocent man charged with murder; or at least one supposes him innocent. That was before von Humboldt took him under his protection. You know, Younger, I could almost wish your university had not bestowed equal honors on Freud and myself. He is very sensitive on such matters.'

I could not well reply to this abrupt turn in Jung's conversation. Clark was not bestowing equal honors on Freud and Jung. As everyone knew, Freud was the centerpiece of Clark's celebration, the keynote speaker, delivering five full lectures, while Jung was a last-minute substitute for a panelist who had canceled.

But Jung did not wait for an answer. 'I understand you asked Freud yesterday if he was a believer. A perceptive question, Younger.' This was another first: Jung had not previously shown a favorable reaction to anything I said. 'No doubt he told you he was not. He is a genius, but his insight has endangered him. One who spends his whole life examining the pathological, stunted, and base may lose sight of the pure, the high, the spirit. I for one don't believe the soul is essentially carnal. Do you?'

'I am not sure, Dr Jung.'

'But you are not drawn to the idea. It is not inherently appealing to you. To them, it is.'

I had to ask him to whom he was now referring.

'All of them,' Jung answered. 'Brill, Ferenczi, Adler, Abraham, Stekel – the lot. He surrounds himself with this – this kind. They all want to tear down whatever is high, to reduce it to genitalia and excrement. The soul is not reducible to the body. Even Einstein, one of their own, does not believe that God can be eliminated.'

.'Albert Einstein?'

'He is a frequent dinner guest at my house,' replied Jung. 'But he too has this same inclination to reduce. He would reduce the entire universe to mathematical laws. It is clearly a characteristic of the Jewish mind. The Jewish male, that is. The Jewish female is simply aggressive. Brill's wife is typical of the race. Intelligent, not unattractive, but so very aggressive.'

'I believe Rose is not Jewish, Dr Jung,' I said.

'Rose Brill?' Jung laughed. 'A woman with that name can be of only one religion.'

I made no reply. Jung had evidently forgotten that Rose's name had not always been Brill.

'The Aryan, 'Jung went on, 'is mythic by nature. He does not try to bring everything down to man's level. Here in

America, there is a similar tendency to reduce, but it is different. Everything here is made for children. All is made simple enough for children to understand: the signs, the advertisements, everything. Even the gait with which people walk is childlike: swinging the arms, like so. I suspect it is the result of your intermingling with the Negro. They are a good-natured race and very religious, but so very simple- minded. They exercise a tremendous influence on you; I notice your Southerners actually speak with the Negro's accent. This is also the explanation of your country's matriarchy. Woman is undoubtedly the dominant figure in America. You American men are sheep, and your women play the ravening wolves.'

I did not like the color in Jung's face. At first I had deemed it an improvement; now he seemed too flushed. The workings of his mind worried me too, for several different reasons. His conversation was disjointed, his logic faulty, his insinuations disturbing. On top of all this, I thought Jung considered himself remarkably well- informed about America for someone who had been in the country two days – particularly on the subject of American women. I changed the subject, informing him that I had just completed my first session with Miss Acton.

Jung's voice went cold. 'What?'

'She has taken rooms upstairs.'

'You are analyzing the girl – you, here, in the hotel?'

'Yes, Dr Jung.'

'I see.' He wished me luck, not very convincingly, and rose to leave. I asked him to convey my regards to Dr Onuf. For a moment, he looked as if I were speaking jibberish. Then he said he would be happy to oblige me.

Chapter Eight

On the eastern bank of the Hudson River, sixty miles north of New York City, stood a massive, sprawling, red-brick Victorian institution built in the late nineteenth century, with six wings, small windows, and a central turret. This was the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

The Matteawan asylum had relatively little security. After all, the 550 inmates were not criminals. They were merely criminally insane. Many had not been charged with a crime at all, and those who were had been found not guilty.

Medical knowledge of insanity in 1909 was not a perfected science. At Matteawan, some 10 percent of the occupants were determined to have been driven insane solely as a result of masturbation. Most others were found to suffer from hereditary lunacy. For a substantial number of inmates, however, the hospital's doctors were hard-pressed to say what had made them mad or, indeed, if they were mad at all.

The violent and raving were packed into overcrowded rooms with padded walls and barred windows. The others were hardly watched. No medication was on offer, no 'talking cures.' The organizing medical idea was mental hygiene. Hence the treatment consisted of early rising, followed by mild but time-consuming labor (principally planting and tending vegetables on the thousand-acre farm surrounding the hospital), prayer service on Sundays, a punctual but vapid supper in the refectory at five, checkers or other wholesome diversions in the evening, and an early bedtime.

The patient in room 3121 passed his days in a different fashion. This patient also had rooms 3122-24. He slept not on a cot, like the other inmates, but on a double bed. And he slept late. Not a reader of books, he received by post several of the New York dailies and all the weekly magazines, which he read over poached eggs while his fellow patients were marched en masse out to the farm for their morning labor. He met with his lawyers several times a week. Best of all, a chef from Delmonico's came up by rail on Friday evenings to prepare his supper, which he took in his own dining room. His champagne and liquor, he liberally shared with the small staff of Matteawan guards, with whom he also played poker at night. When he lost at poker, he tended to break things: bottles, windows, occasionally a chair. So the guards saw to it he did not lose much: the few nickels they sacrificed at cards were more than made up for by the payments he made them to ensure his exemption from the hospital's rules. And they pocketed what was for them a small fortune when they brought in girls for his recreation.

This was not, however, so easy to do. Getting the girls in was not the problem. But the patient in 3121 had definite tastes. He liked his girls young and pretty. This requirement alone made the guards' job a hard one. Worse still, when they found a satisfactory girl, she would never last more than a couple of visits, notwithstanding the lavish remuneration. After a mere twelve months, the guards had well nigh exhausted their supply.

The two gentlemen emerging from room 3121 at one o'clock on Tuesday, the last day of August 1909, had given considerable thought to this difficulty – and had resolved it, at least to their satisfaction. They were not guards. One was a corpulent man wearing a highly self-satisfied expression under his bowler hat. The other was an elegant older gentlemen with a watch chain draped from his vest pocket, a gaunt face, and a pianist's hands.

Mayor McClellan's description of the events at the Acton residence left the coroner sputtering.

'What's the matter with you, Hugel?' asked the mayor.

'I was not informed. Why wasn't I told?'

'Because you are a coroner,' said McClellan. 'No one was killed.'

'But the crimes are virtually identical,' Hugel objected.

'I didn't know that,' said the mayor.

'If you had read my report, you would have!'

'For God's sake, calm down, Hugel.' McClellan ordered the coroner to take a seat. After the two men reviewed the crimes in more detail, Hugel declared that there could be no doubt: Elizabeth Riverford's murderer and Nora Acton's attacker had been one and the same man. 'Great God,' said the mayor quietly. 'Must I issue a warning?'

Hugel laughed dismissively. 'That a killer of society girls is haunting our streets?'

McClellan was puzzled by the coroner's tone. 'Well, yes, I suppose, or words to that effect.'

'Men do not attack young women arbitrarily,' Hugel declared. 'Crimes have motives. Scotland Yard never caught the Ripper because they never found the link between the victims. They never looked. The moment they decided they were dealing with a madman, the case was lost.'

'Great God, man, you're not suggesting the Ripper is here?'

'No, no, no,' replied the coroner, throwing up his hands in exasperation. 'I'm saying that the two attacks are not random. Something connects them. When we find the connection, we will have our man. You don't need a public warning, you need to protect that girl. He already wanted her dead, and now she is the only person who can identify him in court. Don't forget: he doesn't know she lost her memory. He will undoubtedly try to finish the job.'

'Thank heavens I moved her into the hotel,' said McClellan.

'Does anyone else know where she is?'

'The doctors, of course.'

'Did you tell any friends of the family?' asked Hugel.

'Certainly not,' said McClellan.

'Good. Then she is safe for now. Has she remembered anything today?'

'I don't know,' said McClellan gravely. 'I haven't been able to get through to Dr Younger.' The mayor considered his options. He wished he could have called up old General Bingham, his longtime police commissioner, but McClellan had pushed Bingham into retirement only last month. Bingham had refused to reform the police, but he was himself incorruptible and would have known what to do. The mayor also wished Baker, the new commissioner, had not already proved so inept. Baker's only subject of conversation was baseball and how much money could be made in it. Hugel, the mayor reflected, was one of the most experienced men on the force. No: in homicides, he was the most experienced. If he didn't consider a warning necessary, he was probably right. The papers would certainly make hay of it, sowing as much hysteria as they possibly could and heaping scorn on the mayor as soon as they learned, as they certainly would, of the loss of the first victim's body. Then too, McClellan had assured Banwell that the police would try to solve the case without publicity. George Banwell was one of the few friends the mayor had left. The mayor decided to follow Hugel's advice.

'Very well,' said McClellan. 'No warning for now. You had better be right, Mr Hugel. Find me the man. Go to Acton's at once; you will supervise the investigation there.

And tell Littlemore I want to see him immediately.'

Hugel protested. Cleaning his spectacles, he reminded the mayor that it was no part of a coroner's duties to gallivant up and down the city like an ordinary detective. McClellan swallowed his irritation. He assured the coroner that only he could be trusted with a case of such delicacy and importance, that his eyes were famously the sharpest on the force. Hugel, blinking in a way that appeared to express perfect agreement with these assertions, consented to go to the Actons'.

Directly Hugel left his office, McClellan summoned his secretary. 'Ring George Banwell,' he instructed her. The secretary informed the mayor that Mr Banwell had been calling all morning. 'What did he want?' asked the mayor.

'He was rather blunt, Your Honor,' she replied.

'It's all right, Mrs Neville. What did he want?'

Mrs Neville read from her shorthand notes. 'To know "who the devil murdered the Riverford girl, what was taking the blasted coroner so long to finish the autopsy, and where his money was.'"

The mayor sighed deeply. 'Who, what, and where. He's only missing when.' McClellan looked at his watch. The when was running short for him as well. In two weeks at most, the candidates for mayor had to be announced. He had no hope of the Tammany nomination now. His only chance was as an independent or fusion candidate, but that kind of campaign required money. It also required good press, not news of a spree of unsolved attacks on society girls. 'Ring Banwell back,' he added to Mrs Neville. 'Leave word for him to meet me in an hour and a half at the Hotel Manhattan. He won't object; he has a job near there he'll want a look at in any event. And get me Littlemore.'

A half hour later, the detective introduced his head into the mayor's office. 'You wanted to see me, Your Honor?'

'Mr Littlemore,' said the mayor, 'you are aware we have had another attack?'

'Yes, sir. Mr Hugel told me, sir.'

'Good. This case is of special importance to me, Detective. I know Acton, and George Banwell is an old friend of mine. I want to be kept abreast of every development. And I want the utmost discretion. Go to the Hotel Manhattan on the double. Find Dr Younger and see if any progress has been made. If there is any new information, call here at once. And Detective, make yourself inconspicuous. Word must not get out that we have a potential murder witness at the hotel. The girl's life may depend on it. Do you understand?'

'Yes, sir, Mr Mayor,' Littlemore replied. 'Do I report to you, sir, or to Captain Carey at Homicide?'

'You will report to Mr Hugel,' said the mayor, 'and to me. I need this case solved, Littlemore. At any price. You have the coroner's description of the killer?'

'Yes, sir.' Littlemore hesitated. 'Um, one question, sir? What if the coroner's description of the killer is wrong?'

'Do you have reason to think it wrong?'

'I think – ' said Littlemore. 'I think a Chinaman might be involved.'

'A Chinaman?' the mayor repeated. 'Have you told Mr Hugel?'

'He doesn't agree, sir.'

'I see. Well, I would advise you to trust Mr Hugel. I know he is – sensitive – on some points, Detective, but you must bear in mind how hard it is for an honest man to do his work in relative obscurity, while dishonest men attain wealth and renown. That is why corruption is so pernicious. It breaks the will of good men. Hugel is extremely capable. And he thinks highly of you, Detective. He asked specifically that you be assigned to this case.'

'He did, sir?'

'He did. Now get going, Mr Littlemore.'

I was leaving the hotel when I ran into the girl and her servant, Mrs Biggs, about to do their shopping. A cab was just pulling up for them. Because the street bed, rutted with dirt and dry mud, was unfit, I lifted Miss Acton into the carriage. As I did, I noticed uncomfortably that her tiny waist almost fit into my two hands. I sought to assist Mrs Biggs as well, but the good woman would have none of it.

To Miss Acton, I said I looked forward to seeing her tomorrow morning. She asked what I meant. I was referring, I explained, to her next psychoanalytic session. My hand was resting on the open door of her cab; she yanked the door shut, dislodging me. 'I don't know what is wrong with all of you,' she said. 'I don't want any more of your sessions. I will remember everything by myself. Just leave me alone.'

The cab drove off. It is hard to describe my feelings as I watched it rattle away. Disappointed would not quite be adequate. I wished my too-solid body might break up and disperse into the dirt of the street. Brill should have been the analyst. A medical journeyman, a town general practitioner, would have been better, so abysmally had I imitated a psychoanalyst.

I had failed before even beginning. The girl had rejected analysis, and I had been unable to change her mind. No: I had caused the rejection, pressing too hard before the groundwork had been laid. The truth was that I had been unprepared to find she could speak. I had forgotten Freud's own speculation that she might recover her voice overnight. Her voice ought to have been a boon to the treatment, the luckiest possible development. Instead, it disrupted me. I had pictured myself as the patient and infinitely accommodating doctor. Instead, I had dealt with her resistance defensively, like a blundering amateur.

What would I say to Freud?

Entering the Hotel Manhattan, Detective Littlemore passed a young gentleman helping a young lady into a cab. The two figures represented, for Littlemore, a world to which he had no access. They were both easy on the eyes, decked out in the kind of finery that only the better set could afford. The young gentleman was tall, dark-haired, and cheekbony, the young lady more like an angel than Littlemore thought possible on earth. And the gentleman had a way of moving, a fluidity when he swung the young lady into the carriage, that Littlemore knew he himself did not possess.

None of this bothered the detective in the least. He did not resent the young gentleman, and he liked Betty, the maid, better than he liked the angelic young lady. But he decided he was going to learn to move the way the gentleman did. That was something he could figure out and copy. He pictured himself hoisting Betty into a cab just like that – if he ever got to take a cab, much less take one with Betty.

A minute later, after a quick exchange with the reception clerk, Littlemore hustled back outside toward the same young man, who had not moved an inch. Hands clasped behind his back, he was staring at the receding carriage with such ferocious concentration that Littlemore thought there might be something wrong with him.

'You're Dr Younger, aren't you?' asked the detective. There was no reply. 'You okay, pal?'

'Excuse me?' replied the young gentleman.

'You're Younger, right?'

'Unfortunately.'

'I'm Detective Littlemore. The mayor sent me. Was that Miss Acton in the cab?' The detective could see that his interlocutor was not listening.

'I beg your pardon,' replied Younger. 'Who did you say you were?'

Littlemore identified himself again. He explained that Miss Acton's assailant had murdered a girl last Sunday night, but that the police still had no witnesses. 'Has the Miss remembered anything, Doc?'

Younger shook his head. 'Miss Acton has her voice back, but still no memory of the incident.'

'The whole thing seems pretty weird to me,' said the detective. 'Do people lose their memory a lot?'

'No,' Younger answered, 'but it does happen, especially after episodes like the one Miss Acton went through.'

'Hey, they're coming back.'

It was so: Miss Acton's carriage had turned around at the end of the block and was drawing near the hotel once again. As it pulled up, Miss Acton explained to Younger that Mrs Biggs had forgotten to return their room key to the clerk.

'Give it to me,' said Younger, extending his hand. 'I'll take it in for you.'

'Thank you, but I am quite able,' replied Miss Acton, hopping out of the cab unaided and sweeping past Younger without a glance in his direction. Younger showed nothing, but Littlemore knew a feminine rebuff when he saw one, and he sympathized with the doctor. Then a different thought occurred to him.

'Say, Doc,' he said, 'do you let Miss Acton go around the hotel like that – by herself, I mean?'

'I have little say in the matter, Detective. None, actually. But no, I think she's been with her servant or the police at almost every moment until now. Why? Is there any danger?'

'Shouldn't be,' said Littlemore. Mr Hugel had told him that the murderer did not know Miss Acton's location. Still, the detective was uncomfortable. The whole case was out of whack: a dead girl nobody knew anything about, people losing their memory, Chinamen running away, bodies disappearing from the morgue. 'Can't hurt to have a look around, though.'

The detective reentered the hotel, Younger beside him. Littlemore lit a cigarette as they watched the diminutive Miss Acton cross the colonnaded, circular lobby. A man returning his room key would simply have dropped it on the desk and left, but Miss Acton stood patiently at the counter, waiting to be helped. The place was crowded with travelers, families, and businessmen. Half the men there, the detective noticed, could conceivably have met the coroner's description.

One man, however, drew Littlemore's attention. He was waiting for an elevator: tall, black-haired, wearing glasses, a newspaper in his hands. Littlemore didn't have a good angle on his face, but there was something vaguely foreign in the cut of his suit. It was the newspaper that attracted the detective's attention. The man held it slightly higher than was normal. Was he trying to cover his face? Miss Acton had returned her key; she was now walking back. The man threw a quick glance in her direction – or was it toward the detective himself? – and then buried his head in the paper again. An elevator opened; the man went in, by himself.

Miss Acton did not acknowledge the presence of the doctor or the detective as she passed them on her way out. Nevertheless, Younger followed her outside, seeing her back to her carriage.

Littlemore stayed behind. It was nothing, he told himself. Nearly every man in the lobby had looked up at Miss Acton as she walked unaccompanied across the marble floor. All the same, Littlemore kept his eye on the arrow above the elevator into which the man had stepped. The arrow moved slowly, jerking up toward the higher numbers. Littlemore did not, however, see the arrow's final resting place. It was still moving when he heard a piercing cry outside.

The cry was not human. It was the shrill neighing of a horse in pain. The horse in question belonged to a carriage that had just emerged from a construction site on Forty- second Street, where the steel skeleton of a new nine-story commercial building was being raised. The man driving this carriage was superbly attired, with a top hat and a fine cane across his knees. It was Mr George Banwell.

In 1909, the horse was still doing battle with the automobile on every major avenue of New York City. In fact, the battle was already lost. The jerking, honking motorcars were faster and more nimble than a buggy; more than this, the automobile put an end to pollution – a term referring at that time to horse manure, which by midday fouled the air and made the busier thoroughfares almost impassable. Although George Banwell liked his motorcars as much as the next gentleman, he was at heart a horseman. He had grown up with the horse and was not ready to give it up. In fact he insisted on driving his own carriage, making his coachman sit awkwardly beside him.

Banwell had spent most of the morning at his Canal Street site, where he was supervising a vastly larger project. At eleven-thirty, he had driven uptown to Forty-second Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues, less than half a block, from the Hotel Manhattan. Having completed a quick inspection of his men's work there, Banwell was now making for the hotel to meet the mayor. But a moment after taking the reins, he had given them a fierce and abrupt yank, driving the bit into the unfortunate horse's mouth, causing her to halt and cry out. This cry had no effect on Banwell. He seemed not even to hear it. Staring transfixed at a point less than a block ahead of him, he kept the bit digging ever deeper into his horse's jaw, to the appalled dismay of his coachman.

The horse threw her head from side to side, trying in vain to loosen the cutting bit. Finally the creature reared up on her hind legs and let out the extraordinary, anguished cry heard by Littlemore and everyone else up and down the street. She returned to earth but immediately reared again, this time even more wildly, and the entire carriage began to topple. Banwell and his coachman spilled out like sailors from a capsized boat. The carriage tumbled to the ground with an enormous clatter, dragging the horse down with it.

The coachman was first to his feet. He tried to help his master, but Banwell pushed him away violently, brushing the dirt from his knees and elbows. A crowd had gathered about them. Impatient motorists were already blowing their horns. The spell on Banwell was apparently broken. He was not the kind of man who tolerated being thrown by a horse; to be thrown from a carriage was unthinkable. His eyes were furious – at the motorists, at the gawking crowd, and above all at the confused, prostrate horse, which was struggling unsuccessfully to right herself. 'My gun,' he said to his coachman coldly. 'Get me my gun.'

'You can't destroy her, sir,' objected the coachman, who was crouching by the side of the horse, extricating her hoofs from a brace of twisted ropes. 'Nothing's broken. She's just tangled up. There she is. There you are' – this he said to the horse, as he helped her upright – 'it wasn't your fault.'

Doubtless the coachman meant well, but he could not have chosen more ill-favored words. 'Not her fault, eh?' said Banwell. 'She rears like an unbroken jade, and it's not her fault?' He seized the bit and roughly twisted the horse's neck, looking her in the eye. 'I can see,' he said to the coachman, his voice still cold, 'you never taught her to keep her head down. Well, I will.'

Yanking the carriage rods out of her bridle, Banwell seized the reins and mounted the horse bareback. He drove her back into the construction site and there wheeled about until he came to the great dangling hook of the crane that loomed sky-high in the middle of the plot of ground. Taking that hook in both hands, Banwell fixed it under the horse's halter, which was in turn secured firmly around her underbelly. He leaped off the horse and shouted to the crane man, 'You there, take her up. You in the crane: take her up, I say. Can't you hear me? Take her up!'

The astonished crane man was slow to respond. At last he engaged the gears of the hulking machine. Its long cable went taut; its hook clenched at the saddle. The horse stirred and pawed at the uncomfortable sensation. For a moment nothing more happened.

'Lift, you bugger,' Banwell cried to his crane operator, 'lift or go home to your wife tonight without a job!'

The crane man manipulated the levers again. With a lurch, the horse lifted up off the ground. The moment her feet left the earth, uncomprehending panic fell upon the animal. She screamed and thrashed about, succeeding only in making herself twist wildly in the air, suspended by the crane's thick hook.

'Let her go!' a girl's voice, angry and stricken, cried out. It was Miss Acton. Watching the spectacle unfold, she had hurried across Forty-second Street and was now at the front of the crowd. Younger was right next to her, and Littlemore several rows behind. She called out again, 'Let her down. Someone, make him stop!'

'Up,' Banwell ordered. He heard the girl's voice. For a moment, he looked right at her. Then he returned his attention to the horse. 'Higher.'

The crane man did as he was bid, hoisting the creature higher and higher: twenty, thirty, forty feet above the ground. Philosophers say it cannot be known whether animals feel emotions comparable to a human's, but anyone who has seen sheer terror in a horse's eyes can never doubt it again.

Because all human eyes were on the helpless, dangling, thrashing animal, no one in the crowd noticed the stirring of the steel girder three stories up the scaffolding. This girder was secured to a rope, which was in turn connected to the crane hook. Until now that rope had been slack, the steel beam lying harmlessly in place on the scaffold. But as the hook rose, this rope too eventually pulled taut, and now, without warning, the steel girder rolled off the wooden planks. From there it swung freely. Being attached to the crane's hook, it naturally swung in the direction of the hook – which is to say, in the direction of George Banwell.

Banwell never saw the deadly girder hurtling at him, gathering speed as it swung. The beam turned inexorably in the air, so that it came at him dead on, like a gigantic spear aimed at his stomach. Had it struck, it would certainly have killed him. As it happened, it missed him by a foot. This was a stroke of excellent and not atypical good fortune for Banwell, but its consequence was that the beam flew on, now heading for the crowd, several members of whom screamed in fright, a good dozen men diving to the dirt to protect themselves.

There was only one among them, however, who should have dived away. That was Miss Nora Acton, since the twelve- foot steel girder was swinging straight toward her. Miss Acton, however, neither screamed nor moved. Whether it was because the onrushing beam held her somehow in thrall or because it was difficult to know which way to go, Miss Acton stood rooted to her spot, aghast and about to die.

Younger seized the girl by her long blond braid, pulling her hard – and not very chivalrously – into his arms. The hurtling girder whistled by them, so close the two could feel its wind, and flew high into the air behind them.

'Ow!' said Miss Acton.

'Sorry,' said Younger. Then he drew her by the hair a second time, pulling her now in the other direction.

'Ow!' said Miss Acton again, more emphatically, as the steel beam, making its return trip, flew past them once more, this time just missing the back of her head.

Banwell eyed the sailing girder dispassionately as it shot by. With disgust, he watched it soar up and slam into the scaffold from which its journey had begun, destroying that structure as if it had been made of toothpicks, sending men, tools, and wooden planks flying in all directions. When the dust cleared, only the horse was still making noise, neighing and spinning helplessly above their heads. Banwell signaled the crane man to bring her down and, with a cold rage, issued orders to his men to clear the debris.

'Take me back to my room, please,' Miss Acton said to Younger.

The crowd milled about for a long while, admiring the damage and replaying the events. The horse was returned to the coachman, whom Detective Littlemore now approached. The detective had recognized George Banwell. 'Say, how's she doing, the poor thing?' Littlemore asked the coachman. 'What is she, a Perch?'

'Half Perch,' replied the driver, trying as best he could to calm the still trembling animal. 'They call her a Cream.' 'She's a beauty, that's for sure.'

'That she is,' said the coachman, stroking the horse's nose. 'Gee, I wonder what made her rear up like that. Something she saw, probably.' 'Something he saw, more like.' 'How's that?'

'It wasn't her at all,' grumbled the coachman. 'It was him. He was trying to back her up. You can't back up a carriage horse.' He spoke to the mare. 'Tried to make you back up, that's what he did. Because he was scared.' 'Scared? Of what?'

'Ask him, why don't you? He don't scare easy, not him. Scared like he saw the devil himself.'

'How do you like that?' said Littlemore, before heading back to the hotel.

At the same moment, on the top floor of the Hotel Manhattan, Carl Jung stood on his balcony, surveying the scene below. He had seen the extraordinary events in the construction site. Those events had not only frightened him; they filled him with a profound, swelling elation – of a kind he had felt only once or twice in his entire life. He withdrew into his room, where he sat numbly on the floor, his back against the bed, seeing faces no one else could see, hearing voices no one else could hear.

Chapter Nine

When we got back to Miss Acton's rooms, Mrs Biggs was frantic. She ordered Miss Acton first to lie down, then to sit up, then to move about in order to 'get her color back.' Miss Acton paid no mind to any of these commands. She headed straight to the little kitchen with which her suite was equipped and began preparing a pot of tea. Mrs Biggs threw up her arms in protest, declaring that she should be fixing tea. The old woman would not be quiet until Miss Acton sat her down and kissed her hands.

The girl had an uncanny capacity either to regain her composure after the most overwhelming events or to affect a composure she did not feel. She finished the tea and handed a steaming cup to Mrs Biggs.

'You would have been killed, Miss Nora,' said the old woman. 'You would have been killed if not for the young doctor.'

Miss Acton placed her hand on top of the woman's, urging her to take her tea. When Mrs Biggs had done so, the girl told her she would have to leave us because she needed to speak privately with me. After a good deal more importuning, Mrs Biggs was persuaded to go.

When we were alone, Miss Acton thanked me.

'Why have you made your servant leave?' I asked.

'I did not "make" her leave,' replied the girl. 'You wanted to know the circumstances in which I lost my voice three years ago. I wish to tell you.'

The teapot now began to shake in her hands. Attempting to pour, she missed the cup altogether. She put the pot down and clasped her fingers together. 'That poor horse. How could he do such a thing?'

'You are not to blame, Miss Acton.'

'What is the matter with you?' She looked at me furiously. 'Why would I be to blame?'

'There is no reason. But you sound as if you are blaming yourself.'

Miss Acton went to the window. She parted the curtain, revealing a balcony behind a pair of French doors and opening up a panoramic view of the city below. 'Do you know who that was?'

'No.'

'That was George Banwell, Clara's husband. My father's friend.' The girl's breathing became unsteady. 'It was by the lake at his summerhouse. He proposed to me.'

'Please lie down, Miss Acton.'

'Why?'

'It is part of the treatment.'

'Oh, very well.'

When she was on the couch again, I resumed. 'Mr Banwell asked you to marry him – when you were fourteen?'

'I was sixteen, Doctor, and he did not propose marriage.'

'What did he propose?'

'To have – to have – ' She stopped.

'To have intercourse with you?' It is always delicate to refer to sexual activity with young female patients, because one cannot be sure how much they know of biology. But it is worse to let an excess of delicacy reinforce the pernicious sense of shame that a girl may attach to such an experience.

'Yes,' she answered. 'We were staying at his country house, my whole family He and I were walking along the path around their pond. He said he had purchased another cottage nearby, where we could go, with a lovely large bed, where the two of us could be alone and no one would know.'

'What did you do?'

'I slapped him in the face and ran,' said Miss Acton. 'I told my father – who did not take my side.'

'He didn't believe you?' I asked.

'He acted as if I were the wrongdoer. I insisted he confront Mr Banwell. A week later, he told me he had. Mr Banwell denied the charge, according to my father, with great indignation. I am sure he wore very much the same look you saw just now. He only conceded mentioning his new cottage to me. He maintained that I had drawn the wicked inference myself, because of – because of the kind of books I read. My father chose to believe Mr Banwell. I hate him.'

'Mr Banwell?'

'My father.'

'Miss Acton, you lost your voice three years ago. But you are describing an event that occurred last year.'

'Three years ago, he kissed me.'

'Your father?'

'No, how disgusting,' said Miss Acton. 'Mr Banwell.'

'You were fourteen?' I asked.

'Were mathematics difficult for you at school, Dr Younger?'

'Go on, Miss Acton.'

'It was Independence Day,' she said. 'My parents had met the Banwells only a few months earlier, but already my father and Mr Banwell were the best of friends. Mr Banwell's people were rebuilding our house. We had just spent three weeks with them in the country while they finished all the construction. Clara was so kind to me. She is the strongest, most intelligent woman I have ever met, Dr Younger. And the most beautiful. Did you see Lina Cavalieri's Salomé?'

'No,' I answered. The famously beautiful Miss Cavalieri had performed the role at the Manhattan Opera House last winter, but I had been unable to get down from Worcester to see it.

'Clara looks just like her. She was on the stage too, years ago. Mr Gibson did a picture of her. In any event, Mr Banwell had one of those enormous buildings of his going up downtown – the Hanover, I think. We were planning to go to the roof of that building to watch the fireworks. But my mother took ill – she always takes ill – so she remained behind. Somehow, at the last moment, my father couldn't come downtown either. I don't know why. I think he was also ill; there was a fever that summer. In any event, Mr Banwell volunteered to take me to the rooftop, since I had been looking forward to it so very much.'

'Just the two of you?'

'Yes. He drove me in his carriage. It was night. He made the horses canter down Broadway. I remember the hot wind in my face. We rode up in the elevator together. I was very nervous; it was the first time I had ever been in an elevator. I couldn't wait for the fireworks, but when the first cannons burst out, they scared me terribly. I may have screamed. The next thing I knew he had clasped me in both arms. I can still feel him pulling my – my upper body – against him. Then he pressed his mouth upon my lips.' The girl grimaced, as if she wanted to spit.

'And then?' I asked.

'I tore myself from him, but there was nowhere to go. I didn't know how to escape from his roof. He motioned me to calm down, to be quiet. He told me it would be our secret and said we would just watch the fireworks now Which is what we did.'

'Did you tell anyone?'

'No. That is when I lost my voice: that night. Everyone thought I had caught the fever. Perhaps I had. My voice came back to me the next morning, just as it did this time. But I have told no One until this day. After that, I would not consent to be alone with Mr Banwell again.'

A long silence ensued. The girl had evidently come to the end of her immediately conscious memories. 'Think of yesterday, Miss Acton. Do you remember anything?'

'No,' she said quietly. 'I'm sorry.'

I asked her permission to convey what she had said to Dr Freud. She agreed. I then informed her that we should resume our conversation tomorrow.

She seemed surprised: 'What else do we have to converse about, Doctor? I have told you everything.'

'Something more may occur to you.'

'Why do you say that?'

'Because you are still suffering your amnesia. When we have uncovered everything connected with this event, I believe your memory will come back to you.'

'You think I am concealing something?'

'It is not concealment, Miss Acton. Or rather, it is something you are concealing from yourself.'

'I don't know what you are talking about,' the girl replied. When I was a step from the door, she stopped me with her clear, soft voice. 'Dr Younger?'

'Miss Acton?'

Her blue eyes had tears in them. She held her chin high. 'He did kiss me. He did – propose to me by the lake.'

I hadn't realized how anxious she was over the possibility that I too, like her father, might not credit what she told me. There was something indescribably endearing in the way she used 'propose' instead of 'proposition.' 'Miss Acton,' I replied, 'I believe every word you say.'

She burst into tears. I left her, wishing Mrs Biggs a good afternoon as I passed her in the hallway.

In a private corner of the saloon at the Hotel Manhattan,

George Banwell sat with Mayor McClellan. The mayor remarked that Banwell looked as if he had been in a fist- fight. Banwell shrugged. 'A little problem with a filly,' he said.

The mayor withdrew an envelope from his breast pocket and handed it to Banwell. 'Here's your check. I advise you to go to your bank this afternoon. It's very large. And it's the last one. There won't be any more, no matter what. Do we understand each other?'

Banwell nodded. 'If there are additional costs, I'll bear them myself.'

The mayor then explained that Miss Riverford's murderer had apparently struck again. Did Banwell know Harcourt Acton?

'Of course I know Acton,' Banwell replied. 'He and his wife are at my summerhouse now. They joined Clara there yesterday.'

'So that's why we have not been able to reach them,' said McClellan.

'What about Acton?' asked Banwell.

'The second victim was his daughter.'

'Nora? Nora Acton? I just saw her on the street, not one hour ago.'

'Yes, thank God she survived,' answered the mayor.

'What happened?' asked Banwell. 'Did she tell you who did it?'

'No. She's lost her voice and can't remember a thing. She doesn't know who did it, and neither do we. Some specialists are looking at her now. She's here, in fact. I've put her up at the Manhattan until Acton gets back.'

Banwell took this in. 'A good-looking girl.'

'She certainly is,' agreed the mayor.

'Raped?'

'No thank heavens.'

'Thank heavens.'

I found the others in the halls of Roman and Greek antiquity at the Metropolitan Museum. While Freud was engrossed in conversation with the guide – Freud's knowledge was quite astounding – I fell behind with Brill. He was feeling better about his manuscript. His publisher, Jelliffe, had at first been as mystified as we had been, but then recalled that he lent his press the previous week to a church minister, who was publishing a series of edifying biblical pamphlets. Somehow the two jobs must have been merged together.

'Did you know,' I asked Brill, 'that Goethe was Jung's great-grandfather?'

'Rot,' said Brill, who had lived in Zurich for a year, working under Jung. 'Self-glorifying family legends. Did he get to von Humboldt too?'

'Yes, actually,' I replied.

'You would think it would be enough for a man to marry into a fortune without having to invent a lineage for himself.'

'Unless that's why he invents it,' I said.

Brill grunted noncommittally. Then, with a strange lightness, he pulled back a forelock of his hair, revealing a wicked scrape on his brow. 'You see that? Rose did that last night, after you had all left. She threw a fying pan at me.'

'Good Lord,' I said. 'Why?'

'Because of Jung.' 'What?'

'I told Rose about the remarks I made to Freud concerning Jung,' said Brill. 'It sent her into a rage. She told me I was jealous of Jung, that Freud values him, and that I was a fool because Freud would see through my envy and think worse of me for it. To which I replied that I had good reason to be jealous of Jung, given the way she was looking at him all night. In retrospect that may have been a false note, since it was Jung who was looking at her. Do you know she has the same medical training I do? But she can't get a job as a doctor, and I can't support her, with my four patients.'

'She threw a frying pan at you?' I asked.

'Oh, don't give me that diagnostic look. Women throw things. All of them, sooner or later. You'll learn. All except Emma, Jung's wife. Emma merely hands Carl a fortune, mothers his children, and smiles when he cheats on her. Serves his mistresses dinner when he brings them into the house. The man is a sorcerer. No, if I hear another word about Goethe and von Humboldt, I just may kill him.'

Before we left the museum, there was nearly a crisis. Freud suddenly required a urinal, just as he had at Coney Island, and the guide sent us to the basement. On the way downstairs, Freud remarked, 'Don't tell me. I will have to go through endless miles of corridor, and at the end there will be a marble palace.' He was right on both counts. We only reached the palace in the nick of time.

Coroner Hugel did not get back to his office until Tuesday evening. He had spent the afternoon at the Acton house on Gramercy Park. He knew what he would write in his report: that physical evidence – hairs, silk threads, shreds of rope – now proved beyond doubt that the same man who killed Elizabeth Riverford attacked Nora Acton. But the coroner cursed himself for what he had not found. He had scoured the master bedroom. He had pored over the rear garden. He had even crawled through it on hands and knees. As he knew he would, he found broken branches, trampled flowers, and plenty of other signs of flight, but nowhere the proof he sought, the one piece of hard evidence with which he could expose the perpetrator's identity.

He was exhausted when he reached his office. Despite the mayor's command, Hugel hadn't circulated to his staff the offer of a reward to anyone who found the Riverford girl's body. But he could hardly be blamed for that, Hugel told himself. It had been the mayor who ordered him to go directly to the Actons' house rather than back to the morgue.

In the hall, he found Detective Littlemore waiting. Littlemore reported that one of the barracks boys, Gitlow, was on a train to Chicago. He would be there by tomorrow night. In his usual chipper spirits, Littlemore also recounted the strange episode of Mr Banwell and the horse. Hugel listened intently and then exclaimed, 'Banwell! He must have seen the Acton girl outside the hotel. That's what scared him!'

'Miss Acton's not exactly what I'd call scary, Mr Hugel,' said Littlemore.

'You fool' was the coroner's response. 'Of course – he thought she was dead!'

'Why would he think she was dead?'

'Use your head, Detective.'

'If Banwell's the guy, Mr Hugel, he knows she's alive.'

'What?'

'You're saying Banwell's the guy, right? But whoever attacked Miss Acton knows she's alive. So if Banwell's the guy, he doesn't think she's dead.'

'What? Nonsense. He might have thought he had finished her. Or – or he may have been afraid she would recognize him. Either way, he would have panicked when he saw her.'

'Why do you think he's the guy?'

'Littlemore, he is over six foot tall. He is middle-aged. He is rich. His hair was dark but now is graying. He is right-handed. He lived in the same building as the first victim, and he panicked at the sight of the second.'

'How do you know that?'

'From you. You said his driver told you he took fright. What other explanation is there?'

'No, I meant how do you know he's right-handed?'

'Because I met him yesterday, Detective, and I make use of my eyes.'

'Gee, you're something, Mr Hugel. What am I, right- handed or left-handed?' The detective put his hands behind his back.

'Will you stop it, Littlemore!'

'I don't know, Mr Hugel. You should have seen him after it was all over. He was cool as a cucumber, giving orders, cleaning everything up.'

'Nonsense. A good actor, in addition to a murderer. We have our man, Detective.'

'We don't exactly have him.'

'You're right,' mused the coroner. 'I still have no hard evidence. We need something more."

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 Seventy- second 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.