The Interpretation of Murder

Chapter Eleven

I woke at six on Wednesday morning. I hadn't dreamt of Nora Acton – so far as I knew – but as I opened my eyes in the wainscoted white box of my hotel room, I was thinking of her all the same. Could sexual desire for her father really underlie Miss Acton's symptoms? That was plainly the thrust of Freud's thinking. I didn't want to believe it; the thought repulsed me.

I never liked Oedipus. I didn't like the play, I didn't like the man, and I didn't like Freud's eponymous theory. It was the one piece of psychoanalysis I never embraced. That we have an unconscious mental life, that we are constantly suppressing forbidden sexual desires and the aggressions that arise in their wake, that these suppressed wishes manifest themselves in our dreams, our slips of the tongue, our neuroses – all this I believed. But that men want sex with their mothers, and girls with their fathers – this I did not accept. Freud would say, of course, that my skepticism was 'resistance.' He would say I did not want the Oedipus theory to be true. No doubt that was so. But resistance, whatever else it is, surely does not prove the truth of the idea resisted.

Which is why I kept coming back to Hamlet and to Freud's irresistible but infuriating solution to its riddle. In two sentences, Freud had demolished the long-standing notion that Hamlet was, as Jung's 'great-grandfather' Goethe had it, the overly intellectual aesthete, constitutionally incapable of resolute action. As Freud pointed out, Hamlet repeatedly takes decisive action. He kills Polonius. He plans and executes his play-within-a-play, tricking Claudius into revealing his guilt. He sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths. Apparently there is just one thing he cannot do: take vengeance on the villain who killed his father and bedded his mother.

And the reason, Freud says, the real reason, is simple. Hamlet sees in his uncle's deeds his own secret wishes realized: his Oedipal wishes.

Claudius has done only what Hamlet himself wanted to do. 'Thus the loathing which should drive him on to revenge' – to quote Freud – 'is replaced in him by self- reproaches, by scruples of conscience.' That Hamlet suffers from self-reproach is undeniable. Over and over, he castigates himself – excessively, almost irrationally He even contemplates suicide. Or at least that is how the To be, or not to be speech is always interpreted. Hamlet is wondering whether to take his own life. Why? Why does Hamlet feel guilty and suicidal when he thinks of avenging his father? No one in three hundred years had ever been able to explain the most famous soliloquy of all drama – until Freud.

According to Freud, Hamlet knows – unconsciously – that he himself wished to kill his father and that he himself wished to replace his father in his mother's bed, just as Claudius has done. Claudius is, therefore, the embodiment of Hamlet's own secret wishes; he is a mirror of Hamlet himself. Hamlet's thoughts run straight from revenge to guilt and suicide because he sees himself in his uncle. Killing Claudius would be both a reenactment of his own Oedipal desires and a kind of self-slaughter. That is why Hamlet is paralyzed. That is why he cannot take action. He is an hysteric, suffering from the overwhelming guilt of Oedipal desires he has not successfully repressed.

And yet, I felt, there must be some other explanation. There must be another meaning of To be, or not to be. If I could only solve that soliloquy, I somehow imagined it would vindicate my objection to the entire Oedipus theory. But I never had.

At breakfast, I found Brill and Ferenczi at the same table they had occupied yesterday. Brill was manfully assaulting a plate of steak and eggs. Ferenczi was not so hale: he insisted he was not going to touch a crumb all day. Both seemed a little forced in their conversation with me; I think I had interrupted them in private talk. 'The waiters,' said Ferenczi, 'they are all Negro. Is that common in America?'

'Only in the better establishments,' replied Brill. 'New Yorkers opposed emancipation, don't forget, until they realized what it meant: they would get to keep their blacks as servants, only it would cost them less.'

'New York did not oppose emancipation,' I put in.

'A riot is not opposition?' asked Brill.

Ferenczi said, 'You must ignore him, Younger, really you must.'

'Yes, ignore me,' Brill responded. 'Everyone does. Instead, we must attend solely to Jung, because he is "more important than the rest of us put together." '

I saw that Jung had been their topic before I appeared. I asked if they could give me a clearer sense of Jung's relationship to Freud. They did.

Quite recently, over the last two years, Freud had attracted a new set of Swiss followers. Jung was the most prominent. The Zurichers were resented by Freud's original Viennese disciples, whose jealousy had intensified when Freud made Jung editor in chief of the Psychoanalytical Yearbook, the first periodical in the world devoted to the new psychology. In this position, Jung had the power to rule on the merits of everyone else's work. The Viennese objected that Jung had not genuinely embraced the 'sexual aetiology' – Freud's core discovery that repressed sexual wishes lie behind hysteria and other mental illnesses. They felt Jung's elevation demonstrated favoritism on Freud's part. Here, Brill told me, the Viennese were righter than they knew. Freud not only favored Jung but had already selected him as his 'crown prince' and 'heir' – the man who would take over the movement.

I didn't mention having already heard Freud make this very statement to Jung last night, principally because I would then have had to describe Freud's mishap. Instead, I observed that Jung seemed highly sensitive to Freud's opinion of him.

'Oh, we all are,' Ferenczi answered. 'But, not to question, Freud and Jung have very father-son relations. I saw them myself on the ship. Hence Jung is very sensitive to any rebuke. It enrages him. Especially about the transference. Jung has – how shall I say? – a different philosophy when it comes to transference.'

'Really? Has he published it?' I asked.

Ferenczi exchanged a look with Brill. 'Not exactly. I am speaking of his approach to his patients. His – ah – female patients. You understand.'

I was beginning to.

Brill whispered, 'He sleeps with them. He is notorious.'

'Myself, I have never,' said Ferenczi. 'But I have not yet faced too many temptations, so congratulations in my case are sadly premature.'

'Does Dr Freud know?'

This time Ferenczi whispered, 'One of Jung's patients wrote to Freud, most upset, describing everything. Freud showed me letters on the ship. There is even a letter from Jung to the girl's mother – very peculiar. Freud consulted me for guidance.' Ferenczi was distinctly proud of this. 'I told him he should not take the girl's word as proof. Of course I already knew all about it. Everyone does. A beautiful girl – Jewish – a student. They say Jung did not treat her well.'

'Oh, no,' said Brill, looking at the entryway to the breakfast room. Freud was on his way in, but not by himself. He was accompanied by another man, whom I had met in New Haven at the psychoanalytic congress there a few months ago. It was Ernest Jones, Freud's British follower.

Jones had come to New York to join our party for the week. He would then travel up to Clark with us on Saturday. About forty, Jones was as short as Brill but a little stouter, with an exceedingly white face, dark well-oiled hair, almost no chin, and a tight, thin-lipped smile more suggestive of self-satisfaction than amiability. He had the peculiar habit of looking away from a person while addressing him. Freud, who was joking with Jones as they approached our table, was plainly delighted to see him. Neither Ferenczi nor Brill appeared to share this sentiment.

'Sandor Ferenczi,' said Jones. 'What a surprise, old fellow. But you weren't invited, were you? By Hall, I mean, to give a paper at Clark?'

'No,' answered Ferenczi, 'but -'

'And Abraham Brill,' Jones went on, casting his eyes about the room as if expecting to find others he knew. 'How are we getting on? Still only three patients?'

'Four,' said Brill.

'Well, count yourself lucky, old man,' replied Jones. 'I am so crawling with patients in Toronto I don't have a minute to put pen to paper. No, all I have in the pipeline is my handwriting piece for Neurology, a little thing for Insanity, and the lecture I gave at New Haven, which Prince wants to publish. What about you, Brill, anything coming out?'

Jones's remarks had produced an atmosphere less than convivial. Brill assumed an expression of feigned disappointment. 'Only Freud's hysteria book, I'm afraid,' he said.

Jones's lips worked, but nothing came out.

'Yes, only my translation of Freud,' Brill went on. 'My German was rustier than I would ever have believed, but it's done.'

Relief filled Jones's countenance. 'Freud doesn't need translating into German, you sod,' he said, laughing out loud. 'Freud writes in German. He needs an English translator.'

'I am the English translator,' said Brill.

Jones looked dumbfounded. To Freud he said, 'You – you don't – you're letting Brill translate you?' And to Brill, 'But is your English quite up to it, old man? You are an immigrant, after all.'

'Ernest,' said Freud, 'you are displaying jealousy.'

'Me?' answered Jones. 'Jealous of Brill? How could I. be?'

At that moment, a boy carrying a silver platter called out Brill's name. The platter had an envelope on it. With a self-important air, Brill tipped the boy a dime. 'I've always wanted to receive a telegram in a hotel,' he said cheerily. 'I nearly sent one to myself yesterday, just to see how it felt.'

When, however, Brill pulled the message from its envelope, his features froze. Ferenczi seized the missive from his hands and showed it to us. The telegram read:

THEN THE LORD RAINED UPON SODOM BRIMSTONE AND FIRE

STOP AND LO THE SMOKE OF THE COUNTRY WENT UP AS

THE SMOKE OF A FURNACE STOP BUT HIS WIFE LOOKED

BACK FROM BEHIND HIM AND SHE BECAME A PILLAR OF

SALT STOP BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE STOP

'Again,' Brill whispered.

'I say,' Jones responded, 'there's no reason to look as if one had seen a ghost. It is plainly from some religious fanatic. America is full of them.'

'How did they know I would be here?' Brill replied, unreassured.

Mayor George McClellan lived on the Row, in one of the stately Greek Revival townhouses lining Washington Square North. Leaving his house early Wednesday morning, McClellan was startled to see Coroner Hugel rushing toward him from the park across the street. The two gentlemen met between the Corinthian columns framing the mayor's front door.

'Hugel,' said McClellan, 'what are you doing here? Good Lord, man, you look like you haven't slept in days.'

'I had to be sure of finding you,' exclaimed the winded coroner.

'Banwell did it.'

'What?'

'George Banwell killed the Riverford girl,' said Hugel.

'Don't be ridiculous,' replied the mayor. 'I've known Banwell for twenty years.'

'From the moment I entered her apartment,' said Hugel, 'he tried to obstruct the investigation. He threatened to have me removed from the case. He tried to prevent the autopsy.'

'He knows the girl's father, for God's sake.'

'Why should that prevent an autopsy?'

'Most men, Hugel, would not relish the sight of their daughter's corpse sawed open.'

If the mayor intended a hint concerning Hugel's sensibilities, the coroner did not take it. 'He fits the description of the murderer in every respect. He lived in her building; he was a friend of the family, to whom she would have opened her door; and he had her entire apartment cleared out before Littlemore could search it.'

'You had already searched it,' the mayor rejoined.

'Not at all,' said Hugel. 'I only inspected the bedroom. Littlemore was to search the rest of the apartment.'

'Did Banwell know Littlemore was coming? Did you tell him?'

'No,' the coroner grumbled. 'But how do you explain his terror at the sight of Miss Acton on the street yesterday?' He relayed to the mayor the account of the previous day's events reported to him by Littlemore. 'Banwell was trying to flee because he thought she would identify him as her attacker.'

'Nonsense' was the mayor's response. 'He met me in the hotel directly afterward. Are you aware that the Banwells and Actons are the closest of friends? Harcourt and Mildred Acton are at George's summer cottage now.'

'You mean he knows the Actons?' Hugel demanded. 'Why, that proves it! He is the only one who knew both victims.'

The mayor regarded the coroner dispassionately. 'What's that on your jacket, Hugel? It looks like egg.'

'It is egg.' Hugel wiped at his lapel with a yellowed handkerchief. 'Those hooligans on the other side of your park threw it at me. We must arrest Banwell at once.'

The mayor shook his head. The south side of Washington Square was not genteel, and McClellan had not been able to rid the southwest corner of the park of a gang of boys for whom proximity to the mayor's house must have been an additional inducement to their prankstering. McClellan strode past the coroner to the horse-drawn carriage awaiting him. 'I'm surprised at you, Hugel. Speculation piled on top of speculation.'

'It will not be speculation when you have another murder on your hands.'

'George Banwell did not kill Miss Riverford,' said the mayor.

'How do you know?'

'I know,' answered McClellan definitively. 'I won't hear another word of this ludicrous slander. Now go home. You are not fit to be in your office in this state. Get some rest. That's an order.'

The building Littlemore found at 782 Eighth Avenue – where Chong Sing supposedly lived in apartment 4C – was a five-story tenement, dirty, grimy, with fragrant shanks of red-roasted pork and dripping carcasses of duck hanging in the second-floor windows, behind which was a Chinese restaurant. Below the restaurant, at street level, was a dingy bicycle shop, the proprietor of which was white. All the other people in and around the building – the old women bustling in and out the front door, the man smoking a long pipe on the stoop, the faces peering out the upper-story windows – were Chinese.

When the detective began mounting the third flight of unlit stairs, a small man in a long tunic appeared out of the shadows, blocking his way. This man had a wispy beard, a queue hanging down his back, and teeth the color of fresh rust. Littlemore stopped. 'You go wrong way,' the Chinese said, without introduction. 'Restaurant back there. Second floor.'

'I'm not looking for the restaurant,' the detective replied. 'I'm looking for Mr Chong Sing. Lives on the fourth floor. You know him?'

'No.' The Chinese man continued to bar Littlemore's way. 'No Chong Sing upstair.'

'You mean he's out, or he doesn't live here?'

'No Chong Sing upstair,' the Chinese man repeated. He pushed his fingertips against Littlemore's chest. 'You go way.'

Littlemore pushed past the man and continued up the narrow stairway, which creaked under his feet. The fatty smell of meat accompanied him. As he trod the smoky corridor of the fourth floor – windowless and dark, though it was a bright morning – he saw eyes watching him from doorways barely cracked open. No one answered at apartment 4C. Littlemore thought he heard someone hurrying down a back stairway. At first, the aroma of roasted meat had stimulated the detective's appetite; now, in the airless upper floors, mixing with curls of opium smoke, it nauseated him.

When the mayor arrived at City Hall, Mrs Neville informed him that Mr Banwell was calling. McClellan told her to put him through. 'George,' said George Banwell, 'it's George.'

'By George, it is,' said George McClellan, completing an exchange they had initiated almost twenty years ago as fledgling members of the Manhattan Club.

'Just wanted you to know I got through to Acton last night,' said Banwell. 'Told him the ghastly news. He's driving in post haste this morning. He should be at the hotel by noon. I'm meeting him there.'

'Excellent,' said McClellan. 'I'll join you.'

'Has Nora remembered anything?'

'No,' said the mayor. 'The coroner has a suspect, however. You.'

'Me?' exclaimed Banwell. 'I didn't like that little weasel the moment I saw him.'

'Apparently the feeling was mutual.'

'What did you tell him?'

'I told him you didn't do it,' said the mayor.

'What about Elizabeth's body?' asked Banwell. 'Riverford's wiring me about it every other minute.'

'The body has been stolen, George,' said the mayor.

'What?'

'You know the troubles I've had with the morgue. I hope to get it back. Can you put Riverford off for one more day?'

'Put him off?' repeated Banwell. 'His daughter's been murdered.'

'Can you try?' asked the mayor.

'The devil,' said Banwell. 'I'll see what I can do. By the way, who are these – these specialists looking at Nora?'

'Didn't I tell you?' answered the mayor. 'They are therapeutists. Apparently they can cure amnesia just by talking. Fascinating business, actually. They get the patient to tell them all kinds of things.'

'What kinds of things?' asked Banwell.

'All kinds,' answered McClellan.

Coroner Hugel, obeying the mayor's orders, went back to his home, the top two floors of a small wood-frame house on Warren Street. There he lay down on his lumpy bed but didn't sleep. The light was too bright, and the shouts of the teamsters were too loud, even with a pillow over his head.

The house in which Hugel lived was at the outer edge of the Market District in lower Manhattan. When he first rented his rooms, the district was a pleasant residential neighborhood; by 1909, it was overrun by produce warehouses and manufacturing buildings. Hugel had never moved. On a coroner's pay, he could not afford two full floors of a house in a more fashionable part of the city.

Hugel hated his rooms. The ceilings had the same disgusting brown-edged water stains he had to endure at his office. Hugel swore bitterly to himself. He was the coroner of New York City. Why did he have to live in such undignified quarters? Why did his suit have to be so shabby compared to the brushed and tailored cut of George Banwell's jacket?

The evidence against Banwell was easily sufficient to arrest him. Why couldn't the mayor see that? He wished he could arrest Banwell himself. The coroner had no power to make an arrest; he wished he did. Hugel went over everything again. There had to be something more. There had to be a way to make the whole story fit together. If Elizabeth Riverford's murderer had stolen her body from the morgue because there was evidence on that body, what could the evidence be? Suddenly he had an inspiration: he had forgotten the photographs he took in Miss Riverford's apartment. Wasn't it possible for one of his photographs to reveal the missing clue?

Hugel climbed out of bed and dressed hurriedly. He could develop them himself: although he rarely used it, he had his own darkroom adjacent to the morgue. No, it would be safer if Louis Riviere, the police department's photographic expert, did the work.

At nine I went to Miss Acton's room. No one was there. By chance I inquired at the front desk, where I found a message waiting for me, in which Miss Acton informed me that she would be back in her room at eleven: I might call on her then, if I wished.

This was all wrong, analytically. First, I was not 'calling' on Miss Acton. Second, it was not the patient, but the doctor, who ought to control the timing.

In the event, I did call on Miss Acton at eleven. She was perched comfortably on her sofa, just as she had been yesterday morning, taking tea, framed by the French doors opening out to the balcony. Without looking up, Miss Acton invited me to take a seat. This irritated me as well. She was too comfortable. The analytic setting ought to have been an office – my office – and I ought to have been in command of it.

Then she did look up, and I was entirely taken aback. She was tremulous and full of agitation. 'Whom did you tell?' she asked, not accusingly but anxiously. 'About what – what Mr Banwell did to me?'

'Only Dr Freud. Why? What's happened?'

She made eye contact with Mrs Biggs, who produced a piece of paper, folded in two, which the old woman handed to me. On the note was written, in pen, Hold your tongue.

'A boy,' said Miss Acton fretfully, 'out in the street – he put that in my hands and ran off. Do you think Mr Banwell attacked me?'

'Do you?'

'I don't know, I don't know. Why can't I remember? Can't you make me remember?' she beseeched me. 'What if he's out there, watching me? Please, Doctor, can't you help me?'

I had not seen Miss Acton like this. It was the first time she had actually asked for my help. It was also the first time since coming to the hotel that she seemed genuinely afraid. 'I can try,' I answered.

Mrs Biggs knew enough to leave the room of her own accord this time. I put the threatening messsage on the coffee table and made the girl lie down, although she plainly did not like it. She was so agitated she could hardly keep still.

'Miss Acton,' I resumed, 'think back to three years ago, before the incident on the rooftop. You were with your family, at the Banwells' country house.'

'Why are you asking me about that?' she burst out. 'I want to remember what happened two days ago, not three years ago.'

'You don't want to remember what happened three years ago?'

'That's not what I meant.'

'It's what you said. Dr Freud believes you may have seen something then – something you've forgotten – something that's keeping you from remembering now.'

'I have not forgotten anything,' she retorted.

'Then you did see something.'

She was silent.

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

'Stop saying that!' the girl cried out, with a fury entirely unexpected. 'What would I have to be ashamed of?'

'I don't know.'

'Go away,' she said.

'Miss Acton.'

'Go away. I don't like you. You are not clever.'

I did not budge. 'What did you see?' As she made no reply but stared determinedly in another direction, I stood and took a chance. 'I'm sorry, Miss Acton, I can't help you. I wish I could.'

She took a deep breath. 'I saw my father with Clara Banwell.'

'Can you describe what you saw?'

'Oh, all right.'

I took my seat.

'There is a large library on the first floor,' she said. 'I often couldn't sleep, and when I couldn't, that's where I would go. I could read by moonlight there, without even lighting a candle. One night, the door to the library was ajar. I could tell someone was inside. I put my eye to the crack. My father was sitting on Mr Banwell's chair, facing me, the same chair I always sat in. I could see him in the moonlight, but his head was thrown back in a disgusting way. Clara was on her knees before him. Her dress was unfastened. It had fallen down past her waist. Her back was entirely bare. She has a lovely back, Doctor, perfectly white, unblemished, the same pure white skin that you see in… in… and shaped just like an hourglass, or a cello. She was – I don't know how to describe it – undulating. Her head rose and fell in a slow rhythm. I could not see her hands; I believe they were in front of her. Once or twice, she threw her hair over her shoulder, but she kept rising and falling. It was mesmerizing. I did not, of course, understand at that time what I was witnessing. I found her movement beautiful, like a gentle wave lapping at a shore. But I knew very well they were doing something wrong.'

'Go on.'

'Then my father began making a repulsive, rasping noise of some kind. I wondered how Clara could stand that sound. But she not only stood it. It seemed to make her undulation grow faster, more determined. He clutched the armrests of his chair. She rose and fell more and more quickly. I'm sure I was fascinated, but I did not want to watch anymore. I tiptoed upstairs, back to my bedroom.'

'And then?'

'There is no more. That was the end. 'We looked at each other. 'I hope your curiosity is satisfied, Dr Younger, because I don't believe my amnesia has been cured.'

I tried to think through, psychoanalytically, the episode Miss Acton had just described. It had the form of a trauma, but there was one difficulty. Miss Acton did not seem to have been traumatized. 'Did you experience any physical difficulties afterward?' I asked her. 'Loss of voice?'

'No.'

'A paralysis of any part of your body? A cold?'

'No.'

'Did your father find out you saw him?'

'He is too stupid.'

I took this in. 'When you think of your amnesia, right now, what comes to mind?'

'Nothing,' she said.

'There is never nothing in one's mind.'

'You said that last time!' she exclaimed angrily, and then fell silent. She fixed me with her blue eyes. 'Only one thing you have ever done,' she said, 'even began to make me think you could help me, and that had nothing to do with all your questions.'

'What was that?'

She dropped her gaze. 'I do not know if I should tell you.'

'Why?'

'Oh, never mind why. It was in the police station.'

'I examined your neck.'

She spoke quietly, her head averted. 'Yes. When you first touched my throat, for one second I almost saw something – some picture, some memory. I don't know what it was.'

This news was unexpected but not illogical. Freud himself had discovered that a physical touch could release suppressed memories. I had employed that very technique with Priscilla. Possibly, Miss Acton's amnesia was susceptible to this form of treatment as well. 'Are you willing to try something similar again?' I asked her.

'It frightened me,' she said.

'It probably will again.'

She nodded. I went to her and extended my palm. She began to remove her scarf. I told her she needn't; I would touch her forehead, not her neck. She was surprised. I explained that touching the brow was one of Dr Freud's standard methods for eliciting memory. She did not look satisfied but said I should proceed. Slowly I placed my palm to her forehead. There was no reaction. I asked if any thought had come to her.

'Only that your hand is very cold, Doctor,' she replied.

'I'm sorry, Miss Acton, but it seems we must resume talking. The touching has not succeeded.' I took my seat again. She looked almost cross. 'Can you tell me one thing?' I went on. 'You said that Mrs Banwell's back – her bare back – was as white as something you had seen before. But you did not say what.'

'And you would like to know?'

'That is why I asked.'

'Get out,' she said, sitting up.

'I beg your pardon?'

'Get out!' she cried and flung the bowl of sugar cubes at me. Then she stood and did the same with her saucer and cup. Or, rather, these she did not fling; she threw them overhand, as hard as she could. Fortunately, the two objects skewed off in opposite directions, the saucer flying to my left, the cup sailing high and to my right, breaking into several pieces when it hit the wall. Miss Acton picked up the teapot.

'Don't do that,' I said.

'I hate you.'

I stood as well. 'You don't hate me, Miss Acton. You hate your father for trading you to Banwell – in exchange for his wife.'

If I thought the girl's reaction to this would be to collapse in tears on her sofa, I was mistaken. She pounced like a feral cat, swinging the teapot at me. It hit me on my left shoulder. The force was impressive; she had tremendous strength for such a small thing. The top of the pot flew off. Boiling-hot water spilled onto my arm. It hurt, actually, considerably – the scalding water, not the pot – but I neither moved nor showed any reaction. This, I guess, incensed her. She swung the pot at me again, this time at my head.

I was so much taller than she that all I had to do was draw back slightly. The teapot missed its target, and I caught Miss Acton by the arm. Her momentum carried her around, so that her back was to me. I held her arms tightly against her waist, pinning her to me.

'Let me go,' she said. 'Let me go or I will scream.'

'And then? Will you tell them I attacked you?'

'I am counting to three,' she replied fiercely. 'Let me go or I will scream. One, two, th-'

I seized her throat, stopping the word in her mouth. I should not have done so, but my blood was up. It stifled any possibility of her screaming but produced an unexpected side effect as well. All the tension in her body drained away. She dropped the teapot. Her eyes opened wide, disoriented, her sapphire irises darting rapidly back and forth. I didn't know what was stranger: her assault on me or this sudden transformation. I released my hold on her immediately.

'I saw him,' she whispered.

'Can you remember?' I asked.

'I saw him,' she repeated. 'Now it's gone. I think I was tied up. I couldn't move. Oh, why can't I remember?' She turned at once to face me. 'Do it again.'

'What?'

'What you just did. I will remember, I'm sure of it.'

Slowly, never taking her eyes off mine, she undid her scarf, revealing her still-bruised neck. She clutched my right hand in her delicate fingers and drew it toward her neck, just as she had the first time I saw her. I touched the soft skin under her chin, careful to avoid the ugly bruises.

'Is there anything?' I asked.

'No,' she whispered. 'You have to do what you did before.'

I made no reply. I didn't know if she meant what I had done in the police station or what I had done a moment ago.

'Choke me,' she said.

I did nothing.

'Please,' she said. 'Choke me.'

I put my finger and thumb to the place on her neck where the reddish marks were. She bit her lip; it must have hurt. With these bruises covered, there was no sign of her previous attack. There was only her exquisitely turned neck. I squeezed her throat. Instantly her eyes closed.

'Harder,' she said softly.

With my left hand, I held the small of her back. With my right, I choked her. Her back arched, her head fell back. She gripped my hand tightly but did not try to pull it away. 'Do you see anything?' I asked. She shook her head faintly, her eyes still closed. I drew her in more firmly, pressing harder at her neck. Her breath caught in her throat, then stopped altogether. Her lips, vermilion, parted.

It is not easy for me to confess to the wholly improper reactions that came upon me. I had never seen a mouth so perfect. Her lips, slightly swollen, were trembling. Her skin was the purest cream. Her long hair was sparkling, like falling water turned gold by sunlight. I drew her still closer to me. One of her hands was resting on my chest. I don't know when or how it got there.

Suddenly I became aware of her blue eyes looking up into mine. When had they opened? She was mouthing a word. I hadn't realized. The word was stop.

I let go her throat, expecting her to gasp desperately for breath. She did not. Rather, she said, so softly I could barely hear it, 'Kiss me.'

I am obliged to admit I don't know what I would have done with this invitation. But there came, at that moment, a sudden loud rapping at the door, followed by the rattling of a key being worked frantically in the lock. I released her immediately. In the space of a second, she retrieved the teapot from the floor and placed it on the table, from which she also seized the note I'd left there. We both faced the door.

'I remember,' she whispered urgently to me, as the knob turned. 'I know who did it.'

Chapter Twelve

At noon the same day, September 1, Carl Jung was taken to lunch by Smith Ely Jelliffe – publisher, doctor, and professor of mental diseases at Fordham University – at a club on Fifty-third Street overlooking the park. Freud was not invited; neither was Ferenczi, nor Brill, nor Younger. Their exclusion did not perturb Jung. It was another mark, he felt, of his rising international stature. A less magnanimous man would have been crowing about such a thing, rubbing the invitation in the others' noses. But he, Jung, took his duty of charity seriously, so he concealed.

It was painful, however, to have to hide so much. It had started the very first day out of Bremen. Jung had not actually lied, of course. That, he told himself, he would never do. But it was not his fault; they drove him to dissemble.

For example, Freud and Ferenczi had booked second- class berths on the George Washington. Was he to blame? Not wanting to shame them, he had been obliged to say that, by the time he bought his ticket, only first-class cabins were available. Then there had been his dream the first night on board. Its true message was obvious – that he was surpassing Freud in insight and reputation – so, out of solicitude for Freud's sensitive pride, he asserted that the bones he discovered in the dream belonged to his wife, rather than to Freud. In fact, he had cleverly added that the bones belonged not only to his wife but also his wife's sister: he wanted to see how Freud would react to that, given the skeletons in Freud's own closet. These were trivialities, but they had laid the groundwork for the far greater dissimulation that had become necessary since his arrival in America.

The lunch at Jelliffe's club was most gratifying. Nine or ten men sat at the oval table. Intermixed with knowledgeable scientific conversation and an excellent claret was a goodly dose of ribald humor, which Jung always enjoyed. The women's suffragette movement bore the brunt of the raillery. One of the men asked whether anyone had ever met a suffragette he could imagine bedding. The unanimous answer was no. Someone ought to notify these ladies, another gentleman said, that even if they got the vote it didn't mean anyone would sleep with them. All agreed that the best cure for a woman demanding the suffrage was a good healthy servicing; that treatment, however, was so unappetizing one might as well give them the vote instead.

Jung was in his element. For once, there was no need to pretend to be less wealthy than one was. There was no obligation to deny one's ancestry. After the meal, the members repaired to a smoking room, where the conversation continued over cognac. Their ranks gradually thinned until Jung was left with only Jelliffe and three older men. One of these gentlemen now made a subtle signal; Jelliffe instantly rose to leave. Jung stood as well, assuming that Jelliffe s departure indicated his own. But Jelliffe informed him that the three gentlemen wanted the briefest of words with him alone and that a carriage would be waiting when they had done.

In actual fact, Jelliffe was not a member of this club at all. He yearned to belong to it. The men with authority over the society and its membership were those now remaining with him. It was they who had told Jelliffe to bring Jung to them today.

'Do sit down, Dr Jung,' said the man who had dismissed Jelliffe, gesturing toward a comfortable armchair with one of his elegant hands.

Jung tried to remember the gentleman's name, but he had met so many, and was so unused to wine at lunch, he could not.

'It's Dana,' the man said helpfully, his dark eyebrows setting off his silver hair. 'Charles Dana. I was just speaking of you, Jung, with my good friend Ochs over at the Times. He wants to do a story about you.'

'A story?' asked Jung. 'I don't understand.'

'In connection with the lectures we've arranged for you at Fordham next week. He wants an interview with you. He proposes a short biography – two full broadsheet pages.

You'll be quite famous. I didn't know if you'd agree. I told him I'd ask.'

'Why,' answered Jung, 'I – I don't -'

'There is just one obstacle. Ochs' – Dana pronounced it Oaks - 'is afraid you are a Freudian. Doesn't want his paper associated with a – with a- Well, you know what they say about Freud.'

'A sex-crazed degenerate,' said the portly man to the right, smoothing his muttonchop whiskers.

'Does Freud actually believe what he writes?' asked the third gentleman, a balding fellow. 'That every girl he treats attempts to seduce him? Or what he says about feces – feces, for God's sake. Or about fastidious men wanting sex through the anus?'

'What about boys wanting to penetrate their own mothers?' rejoined the portly man, with an expression of utmost disgust.

'What about God?' asked Dana, tamping the tobacco from his pipe. 'Must be hard on you, Jung.'

Jung was uncertain exactly what was being referred to. He didn't answer.

'I know you, Jung,' said Dana. 'I know what you are. A Swiss. A Christian. A man of science, like us. And a man of passion. One who acts on his desires. A man who needs more than one woman to thrive. There is no need to hide such things here. These so-called men who don't act, who let their desires fester like sores, whose fathers were peddlers, who have always felt inferior to us – only they could dream up such vile, bestial fantasies, theorizing God and man into the sewer. It must be hard on you to be associated with that.'

Jung was finding it increasingly difficult to absorb the flow of words. The alcohol must have gone to his head. This gentleman did seem to know him, but how? 'Sometimes it is,' Jung answered slowly.

'I am not in the least anti-Semitic. You need only ask Sachs here.' He indicated the balding man on his left. 'On the contrary, I admire the Jews. Their secret is racial purity, a principle they have understood far better than we. It is what has made them the great race they are.' The man referred to as Sachs gave away nothing; the portly man merely pursed his fleshy lips. Dana continued: 'But last Sunday, when I looked up at our bleeding Savior and imagined this Viennese Jew saying our passion for Him is sexual, I found it difficult to pray. Very. I should think you might have encountered similar difficulties. Or are Freud's disciples required to give up the church?'

'I go to church' was Jung's awkward reply.

'For myself,' said Dana, 'I can't say I see it: this rage for psychotherapeutics. The Emmanuels, the New Thought, mesmerism, Dr Quackenbos -'

'Quackenbos,' harrumphed the muttonchops.

'Eddyism,' Dana went on, 'psychoanalysis – they are all cults, to my thinking. But half the women in America are running around demanding it, and it's best they don't drink from the wrong well. They'll be drinking from yours, believe me, after they read about you in the Times. Well, the long and short of it is this: we can make you the most famous psychiatrist in America, but Ochs can't write you up unless you make clear in your lectures at Fordham – unmistakably clear – that you don't go in for the Freudian obscenities. Good afternoon, Dr Jung.'

The rapping on the door of Miss Acton's hotel room continued as the doorknob turned this way and that. At last the door flew open, and in rushed five persons, three of whom I recognized: Mayor McClellan, Detective Littlemore, and George Banwell. The other two were a gentleman and lady of evident wealth.

The man looked to be in his late forties, fair in complexion but sunburned and peeling, with a pointy chin, deeply receding hairline, and a white gauze bandage over most of his left eye. It was instantly clear that he was Miss Acton's father, although the long limbs that were so graceful on her frame looked effete on him, and the features so softly feminine in her case conveyed diffidence in his. The woman, whom I took to be Miss Acton's mother, was at most five feet tall. She was of greater girth than her husband, had a deal of jewelry and paint on her face, and wore shoes with dangerously high heels, presumably to add a few inches to her height. Possibly she had been attractive once. It was she who spoke first, crying out, 'Nora, you piteous, unlucky girl! I have been in agony since I heard the monstrous news. We have been riding for hours. Harcourt, are you just going to stand there?'

Nora's father apologized to the stout woman, extended his arm to her, and conducted her safely to a chair, into which she dropped with a great cry of exhaustion. The mayor introduced me to Acton and his wife, Mildred. It turned out their party had just arrived in the lobby when someone called down to the front desk complaining about noises in Miss Acton's room. I assured them we were quite safe, rather wishing the teacup was not lying in pieces against the far wall. Their backs were to it; I think they didn't see.

'Everything's going to be all right now, Nora,' said Mr Acton. 'The mayor tells me there has been nothing in the press, thank goodness.'

'Why did I listen to you?' Mildred Acton asked her daughter. 'I said we should never have left you behind in New York. Didn't I say so, Harcourt? Do you see what has happened? I thought I would die when I heard. Biggs! Where is that Biggs? She will pack for you. We must get you out of here, Nora, at once. I do believe the rapist is here in this hotel. I have a sense for these things. The moment I walked in, I felt his eyes on me.'

'On you, my dear?' asked Acton.

I cannot say I observed in Miss Acton the warm affection or the sense of protection you might wish to see in a girl greeting her parents after a prolonged and eventful separation. Nor could I blame her, given the tenor of the remarks made to her so far. The odd thing was that Miss Acton had not yet said a word. She had made several starts at speaking, but none of these efforts had eventuated in speech. A furious influx of blood now came to her cheeks. Then I realized: the girl had lost her voice again. Or so I thought, until Miss Acton said, quietly and evenly, 'I have not been raped, Mama.'

'Hush, Nora,' her father replied. 'That word is not spoken.'

'You cannot know, poor thing!' her mother exclaimed. 'You have no memory of the crime. You will never know.'

Now was the moment when, if she were going to, Miss Acton would have said that she had recovered her memory. She did not do so. Instead, the girl replied, 'I will stay here in the hotel to continue my treatment. I don't want to go home.'

'Do you hear her?' cried her mother.

'I will not feel safe at home,' said Miss Acton. 'The man who attacked me may be watching for me there. Mr McClellan, you said so yourself on Sunday.'

'The girl is right,' the mayor replied. 'She is much safer in the hotel. The murderer does not know she is here.'

I knew this to be false, because of the note Miss Acton received in the street. Miss Acton obviously knew the same. In fact, at the mayor's words I saw her right hand clench; a corner of the note was sticking out from her fist. Yet she said nothing. Instead, she looked from McClellan to her parents, as if he had quite vindicated her position. It came to me that she was avoiding Mr Banwell's scrutiny.

Banwell had been eyeing Nora with a peculiar expression. Physically, he dominated the others. He was taller than anyone else in the room with the exception of myself and had a barrel chest. His dark hair was smoothed back with an unguent of some kind and graying handsomely at the temples. His gaze was fixed on Nora. It will seem preposterous, and another observer would no doubt have denied it, but the best way I can describe his expression is to say that, to me, he looked like he wished to do her violence. He now spoke, but his voice betrayed no such feeling. 'Surely the best thing is to get Nora out of the city,' he said with what sounded like gruff but genuine concern for her safety. 'Why not my country place? Clara can take her.'

'I prefer to stay here,' said Nora, looking down.

'Really?' replied Banwell. 'Your mother thinks the murderer is in the hotel. How can you be sure he isn't keeping watch on you even now?'

Miss Acton's face reddened as Banwell spoke to her. Her whole body, to me, seemed tense with fear.

I announced that I would be leaving. Miss Acton looked up at me anxiously. I added, as if just recalling something, 'Oh, Miss Acton, your prescription – for the sedative I mentioned. Here it is.' I withdrew a script from my pocket, quickly filled it out, and handed it to her. On it was written, Was it Banwell?

She saw my message. She nodded to me, slightly but definitively.

'Why don't you give that to me?' asked Banwell, narrowing his eyes on me. 'My man downstairs can run to the pharmacy right now.'

'Very well,' I replied. From Miss Acton's hand, I took my note. I handed the latter to him. 'See if your man can fill that.'

Banwell read it. 1 half expected him to crush it and glare at me menacingly, revealing himself like the villain in some cheap romance. Instead, he exclaimed, 'What the devil is this – Hold your tongue ? You'd better have an explanation, young man.'

'This is a warning Miss Acton received on the street this morning,' I said, 'as you well know, Mr Banwell, since you wrote it.' A stunned silence followed. 'Mr Mayor, Mr Littlemore: this man is the criminal you are looking for. Miss Acton remembered the attack on her just minutes before you came in. I advise you to arrest him at once.'

'How dare you?' said Banwell.

'What is this – this person?' asked Mildred Acton, referring to me. 'Where does he come from?'

'Dr Younger,' said Mayor McClellan, 'you do not appreciate the gravity of a false accusation. Withdraw it. If Miss Acton has told you this, her memory is playing a trick on her.'

'Mr Mayor, sir – ' began Detective Littlemore.

'Not now, Littlemore,' the mayor said calmly. 'Doctor, you will withdraw your accusation, offer Mr Banwell an apology, and tell us what Miss Acton has said to you.'

'But Your Honor – ' said the detective.

'Littlemore!' the mayor barked so furiously it drove Littlemore back a step. 'Didn't you hear me?'

'Mayor McClellan,' I broke in, 'I don't understand. I have just told you Miss Acton remembers the attack. Your own detective seems to have something confirmatory to add. Miss Acton has positively identified Mr Banwell as her assailant.'

'We have only your word for that, Doctor – if that's what you are,' said Banwell. He looked hard at Miss Acton; it seemed to me he was laboring strenuously to restrain a powerful emotion. 'Nora, you know perfectly well I have done nothing to you. Tell them, Nora.'

'Nora,' said the girl's mother, 'tell this young man he is under a misimpression.'

'Nora dear?' said her father.

'Tell him, Nora,' said Banwell.

'I won't tell him,' answered the girl, but that is all she said.

'Mr Mayor,' I said, 'you cannot allow Miss Acton to be cross-questioned by the man who attacked her – a man who has already murdered another girl.'

'Younger, I am convinced you mean well,' replied the mayor, 'but you are wrong. George Banwell and I were together Sunday night, when Elizabeth Riverford was murdered. He was with me – do you hear it, with me - all that evening and night and well into Monday morning as well. Two hundred fifty miles out of town. He could not have killed anyone.'

In the library, after Jung's departure, curling tails of smoke wafted up to the ceiling. A servant removed glasses, replaced ashtrays, then quietly withdrew.

'Do we have him?' asked the balding man, who had been referred to as Sachs.

'Without doubt,' answered Dana. 'He is even weaker than I had imagined. And we have more than sufficient to destroy him in any event. Does Ochs have your remarks, Allen?'

'Oh, yes,' answered the portly, sideburned gentleman with the thick lips. 'He will publish mine the same day he interviews the Swiss.'

'What about Matteawan?' asked Sachs.

'Leave that to me,' Dana replied. 'What remains is to block their other means of dissemination. Which, by tomorrow, we will have done.'

Even after hearing the mayor exculpate him, I could not accept Banwell's innocence. Subjectively, that is. Objectively, I had no grounds for disbelief or protest.

Nora refused to go home. Her father pleaded. Her mother was indignant at what she called the girl's obstinacy. The mayor resolved the situation. Now that he had seen the note, he said, it was clear the hotel was no longer safe. But the Actons' home could be secured. Indeed, it could be made safer than could a large hotel with its many entrances. He would station policemen outside the house, front and back, day and night. Moreover, he reminded Miss Acton, she was still a minor: under the law, he would be obliged to effectuate her father's wishes, even against her will.

I thought Miss Acton would burst out in some way. Instead she gave in, but only on the condition that she be permitted to continue her medical treatment tomorrow morning. 'Especially,' she added, 'now that I know my memory is not to be trusted.' This she said with apparent sincerity, but it was impossible to say whether she was faulting the trustworthiness of her memory or rebuking those who refused to trust it.

She did not look at me after that, not even once. The silent ride down the elevator was excruciating, but Miss Acton held herself with a dignity lacking in her mother, who appeared to regard everything she encountered as a personal affront. An appointment was made for me to visit their house on Gramercy Park early the next day, and they departed in an automobile downtown. McClellan did the same. Banwell, casting a last glance in my direction, by no means benevolent, departed in a horse-drawn carriage, leaving Detective Littlemore and me on the sidewalk.

He turned to me. 'She told you it was Banwell?'

'Yes,' I said.

'And you believe her, don't you?'

'I do.'

'Can I ask you something?' said Littlemore. 'Say a girl loses her memory. Just comes up empty. Then her memory comes back. Can you put money on it, when it comes back? Can you bank on it?'

'No,' I replied. 'It could be false. It could be fantasy, mistaken for memory.'

'But you believe her?'

'Yes.'

'So what are you saying, Doc?'

'I don't know what I'm saying,' I said. 'Can I ask you something, Detective? What were you going to tell the mayor in Miss Acton's room?'

'I just wanted to remind him that Coroner Hugel – he's in charge of the case – thought Banwell was the killer too.'

'Thought so?' I asked. 'You mean he doesn't anymore?'

'Well, he can't anymore, not after what the mayor just said,' Littlemore replied.

'Couldn't Banwell have attacked Miss Acton even if someone else killed the other girl?'

'Nope,' answered the detective. 'We've got proof. It was the same guy both times.'

I went back inside, unsure of myself, my patient, my situation. Was it conceivable that McClellan was covering for Banwell? Would Nora be safe at her house? The front clerk called out my name. There was a letter for me, just delivered. It proved to be from G. Stanley Hall, president of Clark University. The letter was long – and deeply disturbing.

Outside the Hotel Manhattan, Detective Littlemore made for the cabstand.

From the old hack last night, Littlemore knew that the black-haired man – the one who left the Balmoral at midnight on Sunday – had climbed into a red and green gas-powered taxi in front of the Hotel Manhattan. That piece of information told the detective a good deal. Only a decade previously, every taxi in Manhattan had been horse-drawn. By 1900, a hundred motorized taxis tooled around the city, but these were electrically powered. Weighed down by their eight-hundred-pound batteries, the electric taxis were popular but ponderous; passengers occasionally had to get out and help push when going up the rare steep incline. In 1907, the New York Taxicab Company launched the first fleet of gasoline cars for hire, equipped with meters so that riders could see the fare. These cabs were instant hits – hits, that is, with the better class, who alone could afford the fifty-cents-per-mile charge – and quickly came to outnumber all other cabs, electric and horse, in the city. You always knew a New York Taxicab when you saw one, because of its distinctive red and green paneling.

Several of these vehicles were parked at the Hotel Manhattan cabstand. The drivers told Littlemore to try the Allen garage on Fifty-seventh Street, between Eleventh and Twelfth avenues, where New York Taxicab had its main office and where he could easily find out who had been working the graveyard shift on Sunday. The detective's luck was good. Two hours later, he had answers. A driver named Luria had picked up a black-haired man in front of the Hotel Manhattan after midnight last Sunday. Luria remembered it distinctly, because the man had come not out of the hotel but out of a hackney. Littlemore also learned where the black-haired man had gone, and the detective went to that destination – a private house – himself. There his luck ran out.

The house was on Fortieth just off Broadway. It was a two-story affair, with a gaudy knocker and thick red curtains on its windows. Littlemore had to knock five or six times before an attractive young woman answered. The girl was considerably underdressed for the middle of the afternoon. When Littlemore explained that he was a police detective, she rolled her eyes and told him to wait.

He was shown to a parlor with thick Oriental carpets on the floor, a dazzling array of mirrors on the walls, and a smother of purple velour on the furniture. The odor of tobacco and alcohol clung to the folds of the curtains. A baby was crying upstairs. Five minutes later, another woman, older and quite fat, came down the red-carpeted stairs in a claret-colored robe.

'You've got a lot of nerve,' said this woman, who introduced herself as Susan Merrill – Mrs Susan Merrill. From a wall safe concealed behind a mirror, she withdrew a carved iron strongbox, which she opened with a key. She counted out fifty dollars. 'Here. Now get out. I'm already late.'

'I don't want your money, ma'am,' said Littlemore.

'Oh, don't tell me. You make me sick, all of you. Greta, get back in here.' The underdressed girl lounged in, yawning. Although it was a quarter past three, she had in fact been asleep until Littlemore knocked at the door. 'Greta, the detective doesn't want our money. Take him to the green room. Make it quick, mister.'

'I'm not here for that either, ma'am,' said Littlemore. 'I just want to ask you a question. There was a guy who came here late Sunday night. I'm trying to find him.'

Mrs Merrill eyed the detective dubiously. 'Oh, so now you want my customers? What are you going to do, shake them down too?'

'You must know some bad policemen,' said Littlemore.

'Is there any other kind?'

'A girl was killed Sunday night,' Littlemore answered. 'The guy who did it whipped her. Tied her up, cut her up pretty good too. Then he strangled her. I want that guy. That's it.'

The woman drew her burgundy robe around her shoulders. She restored her money to the strongbox and shut it. 'Was she a streetwalker?'

'No,' said the detective. 'Rich girl. Really rich. Lived in a fancy building uptown.'

'Well, isn't that a shame. What's it got to do with me?'

'This guy who came here,' Littlemore answered. 'We think he might be the killer.'

'Do you have any idea, Detective, how many men come through here on a Sunday night?'

'This guy would have been by himself. Tall, black hair, carrying a black case or bag or something.'

'Greta, do you remember anybody like that?'

'Let me think,' mused the dreamy Greta. 'No. Nobody.'

'Well, what do you want from me?' said Mrs Merrill. 'You heard her.'

'But the guy came here, ma'am. The cabbie left him off right outside your door.'

'Left him off? That doesn't mean he came in. I'm not the only house on the block.'

Littlemore nodded slowly. It seemed to him that Greta was a little too blase, and Mrs Merrill a little too eager to see him leave.

Chapter Thirteen

She had asked me to kiss her.

I was walking across town on Forty-second Street, but in my mind's eye I kept seeing Nora Acton's parted lips. I kept feeling her soft throat in my hands. I heard her whisper those two words.

President Hall's letter was in my vest pocket. I should have had only one thought in my head: how to deal with the potential ruination not only of next week's conference at Clark but of Dr Freud's entire reputation, at least in America. All I could see, however, was Miss Acton's mouth and closed eyes.

I didn't fool myself. I knew what her feelings for me were. I had seen it before, too many times. One of my Worcester patients, a girl named Rachel, used to insist on disrobing down to her waist at every analytic session. Each time she offered a new reason: an irregular heartbeat, a rib she feared broken, a throbbing pain in her lower back. And Rachel was just one of many. In all these cases I had never resisted temptation – because I had never been tempted. On the contrary, the emergence of seductive machinations in my analysands struck me as macabre.

Had my patients been more attractive, I doubt their behavior would have inspired in me the same feelings of unwholesomeness. I have no particular virtue. But these women weren't attractive. Most of them were old enough to be my mother. Their desire repulsed me. Rachel was different. She was appealing: long legs, dark eyes – a little close-set, to be sure – and a figure that would have been called good, or better than good. But she was aggressively neurotic, which has never enticed me.

I used to imagine other girls, prettier ones, consulting me. I used to imagine indescribable – but not impossible – events in my office. Thus it came to pass that whenever a new psychoanalytic patient first called on me, I found myself assessing her comeliness. As a result, I began to repulse myself, to the point where I wondered if I ought to continue holding myself out as an analyst. I hadn't taken on a new analytic patient all this summer – until Miss Acton.

And now she had invited me to kiss her. There was no hiding, from myself, what I wanted to do with her. I had never experienced so violent a desire to overpower, to possess. I very much doubted I was in the throes of the counter-transference. To be candid, I had felt the same desire practically the first instant I laid eyes on Miss Acton. But for her the case was clearly different. She was not just recovering from the trauma of a physical attack. More than this, the girl was suffering a transference of the most virulent strain.

She had shown every sign of disliking me until the moment when she felt her suppressed memories flooding back, released by the physical pressure I had applied to her neck. At that moment, I became for her some kind of masterful figure. Before then, dislike was too mild a term. She hated me; she said so. After that moment, she wanted to give herself to me – or so she thought. For it was plain as newsprint, sorry though I was to admit it, that this love she felt, if love it could be called, was an artifact, a fiction created by the intensity of the analytic encounter.

Although I have no memory of crossing Sixth or Seventh Avenue, I found myself abruptly in the middle of Times Square. I went to the roof garden at Hammerstein's Victoria, where I was to have met Freud and the others for lunch. The roof garden was a theater in its own right, with a raised stage, terraces, box seats, and a roof of its own fifty feet overhead. The show, a high-wire act, was still going. The tightrope artist was a bonneted French girl, clad in a sky-blue dress and blue stockings. Each time she threw out her parasol for balance, the well-dressed women in the audience would scream in unison. I have never understood why audiences react that way: surely the person on the high wire is only pretending to be in danger.

I couldn't find the others. I was obviously too late; they must have gone on. So I went back up to Brill's building on Central Park West, where I knew they would eventually return. No one answered the buzzer. I crossed the street and took a seat on a bench, quite by myself, Central Park behind me. From my briefcase I pulled out Hall's letter. After rereading it at least a half dozen times, I finally put it away and took out some other reading matter – I need hardly say what it was.

'You have them?' Coroner Hugel demanded of Louis Riviere, head of photographic facilities, in the basement of police headquarters.

'I am varnishing now,' called out Riviere, standing over a sink in his darkroom.

'But I left the plates for you at seven this morning,' Hugel protested. 'Surely they're ready.'

'Be tranquil, if you please,' said Riviere, switching on a light. 'Come in. You can look at them.'

Hugel entered the darkroom and pored over the pictures with nervous excitement. He went through the plates rapidly, one by one, casting aside those in which he was not interested. Then he stopped, gazing at a close-up of the girl's neck, showing a prominent circular mark.

'What's this, here, on the girl's throat?' he asked.

'A bruise, no?' said Riviere.

'No ordinary bruise would be so perfectly circular,' the coroner replied, taking off his glasses and bringing the picture within an inch of his face. The photograph showed a grainy, round black spot against an almost white neck. 'Louis, where is your glass?'

Riviere produced what looked like an inverted shot glass. The coroner snatched it from his hands, placed it on the photograph where the dark spot was, and put his eye to it. 'I have him!' he cried. 'I have him!'

From outside the darkroom came Detective Littlemore s voice. 'What is it, Mr Hugel?'

'Littlemore,' said Hugel, 'you're here. Excellent.'

'You asked me to come, Mr Hugel.'

'Yes, and now you'll see why,' said the coroner, gesturing for Littlemore to look through Riviere's magnifying glass. The detective complied. Under magnification, the grainy lines inside the black circle resolved into a more distinct figuring.

'Say,' said Littlemore, 'are those letters?'

'They are indeed,' replied the coroner triumphantly. 'Two letters.'

'There's something funny about them,' Littlemore went on. 'They don't look right. The second one could be a J. The first one – I don't know.'

'They don't look right because they are backward, Mr Littlemore,' said the coroner. 'Louis, explain to the detective why the letters are backward.'

Riviere looked through the glass. 'I see them: two letters, interlocking. If they are backward, then the one on the right, which Monsieur Littlemore called J, is not J but G.'

'Correct,' said the coroner.

'But why,' Riviere asked, 'should the writing be backward?'

'Because, gentlemen, it is an imprint left on the girl's neck by the murderer's tiepin.' Hugel paused for dramatic effect. 'Recall that the murderer used his own silk tie to strangle Miss Riverford. He was clever enough to remove that tie from the murder scene. But he made one mistake. On his tie, when he committed the act, was his pin – a pin embossed with his own monogram. By chance, the pin was in direct contact with the soft, sensitive skin of the girl's throat. Because of the extreme and lengthy pressure, the monogram left an impression on her neck, just as a tight ring will leave an indentation on the finger. This imprint, gentlemen, records the murderer's initials as definitively as if he had left us a calling card, except in mirror image. The letter on the right is a reverse G, because G is the first initial of the man who killed Elizabeth Riverford. The letter on the left is a reverse B, because that man was George Banwell. Now we know why he had to steal her body from the morgue. He saw the telltale bruise on her neck and knew I would eventually decipher it. What he did not foresee was that stealing the corpse would be useless – because of this photograph!'

'Mr Hugel, sir?' said Detective Littlemore.

The coroner heaved a sigh. 'Shall I explain it again, Detective?'

'Banwell didn't do it, Mr Hugel,' Littlemore said. 'He's got an alibi.'

'Impossible,' said Hugel. 'His apartment is on the same floor of the very same building. The murder occurred between midnight and two on a Sunday. Banwell would have returned from any engagement before that.'

'He's got an alibi,' Littlemore repeated, 'and what an alibi. He was with the mayor all Sunday night until early Monday morning – out of town.'

'What?' said the coroner.

'There is another flaw in your argument,' interjected Riviere. 'You are not so familiar with photographs as I. You took these pictures yourself?'

'Yes,' replied the coroner, frowning. 'Why?'

'These are ferrotypes. Most retrograde. You are fortunate I keep a supply of iron sulfate. The image you have here differs from the reality. Left is right, and right is left.'

'What?' said Hugel again.

'A reverse image. So if the mark on the girl's neck is the reverse of the true monogram, then the photograph is the reverse of the reverse.'

'A double reverse?' asked Littlemore.

'A double negative,' said Riviere. 'And a double negative is a positive. Meaning that this picture shows the monogram as it would actually look, not a reverse of it.'

'It can't be,' cried Hugel, more injured than disbelieving, as if Littlemore and Riviere were deliberately trying to rob him.

'But undoubtedly it is, Monsieur Hugel,' said Riviere.

'So that was a J,' said Detective Littlemore. 'The guy's named Johnson or something. What's the first letter?'

Riviere put his eye to the glass again. 'It does not look like a letter at all. But it is possibly an E, I would like to say – or no, maybe a C.'

'Charles Johnson,' said the detective.

The coroner only stood where he was, repeating, 'It can't be.'

At last a taxi pulled up at Brill's building, and the four men – Freud, Brill, Ferenczi, and Jones – piled out. It turned out they had gone to a moving-picture show after lunch, a cops-and-robbers affair with wild chases. Ferenczi could not stop talking about it. He had, Brill told me, actually dived out of his seat when a locomotive appeared to steam straight at the audience; it was his first motion picture.

Freud asked me if I wanted to take an hour in the park with him to report on Miss Acton. I said I would like nothing more but that something else had come up; I had received unpleasant news in the post.

'You're not the only one,' said Brill. 'Jones got a wire this morning from Morton Prince up in Boston. He was arrested yesterday.'

'Dr Prince?' I was shocked.

'On obscenity charges,' Brill continued. 'The obscenity in question: two articles he was about to publish describing cures of hysteria effected through the psychoanalytic method.'

'I shouldn't worry about Prince,' said Jones. 'He was mayor of Boston once, you know. He'll come out right.'

Morton Prince was never mayor of Boston – his father was – but Jones was so definite I didn't want to embarrass him. Instead I asked, 'How could the police know what Prince was planning to publish?'

'Exactly what we have been wondering,' said Ferenczi.

'I never trusted Sidis,' added Brill, referring to a doctor on the editorial board of Prince's journal. 'But we must remember it's Boston. They'll arrest a chicken breast sandwich there if it's not properly dressed. They arrested that Australian girl – Kellerman, the swimmer – because her bathing costume didn't cover her knees.'

'I'm afraid my news is even worse, gentlemen,' I said, 'and it concerns Dr Freud directly. The lectures next week are in doubt. Dr Freud has been personally attacked – I mean, his name has been attacked – in Worcester. I cannot tell you how sorry I am to be the messenger.'

I proceeded to summarize as much as I could of President Hall's letter without entering into the sordid accusations against Freud. An agent representing an exceedingly wealthy New York family met with Hall yesterday, offering a donation to Clark University that Hall described as 'most handsome.' The family was prepared to fund a fifty-bed hospital for mental and nervous disorders, paying for a new building as well as all the most modern equipment, nurses, staff, and salaries sufficient to attract the best neurologists from New York and Boston.

'That would cost half a million dollars,' said Brill.

'Considerably more,' I replied. 'It would make us in one blow the leading psychiatric institute in the nation. We would surpass McLean.'

'Who is the family?'

'Hall doesn't say,' I replied to Brill.

'But is this permitted?' asked Ferenczi. 'A private family paying a public university?'

'It is called philanthropy,' answered Brill. 'It is why American universities are so rich. And why they will soon overtake the greatest European universities.'

'Bosh,' ejaculated Jones. 'Never.'

'Go on, Younger,' said Freud. 'There is nothing amiss in what you have told us so far.'

'The family has stipulated two conditions,' I continued. 'A member of the family is apparently a well-known physician with views about psychology. The first condition is that psychoanalysis cannot be practiced at the new hospital or taught anywhere in Clark's curriculum. The second is that Dr Freud's lectures next week must be canceled. Otherwise the gift will go to another hospital – in New York.'

Various exclamations of dismay and denunciation followed. Only Freud remained stoic. 'What does Hall say he will do?' he asked.

'I'm afraid that is not all,' I said. 'Nor is it the worst. President Hall was given a dossier on Dr Freud.'

'Go on, for God's sake,' Brill scolded me. 'Don't play hide-and-seek.'

I explained that this dossier purported to document instances of licentious – indeed, criminal – behavior by Freud. President Hall was told that Freud's gross misconduct would soon be reported by the New York press. The family was certain that Hall, after reading the contents, would agree that Freud's appearance at Clark must be canceled for the good of the university. 'President Hall did not send the file itself,' I said, 'but his letter summarizes the charges. May I give you the letter, Dr Freud? President Hall asked me specifically to say he felt you had a right to be informed of everything said against you.'

'Sporting of him,' remarked Brill.

I don't know why – perhaps because I was the letter's bearer – but I felt responsible for the unfolding disaster. It was as if I had personally invited Freud to Clark, only to destroy him. I was not anxious solely for Freud's sake. I had selfish reasons for not wanting to see this man brought down, on whose authority I had staked so many of my own beliefs – indeed, so much of my own life. None of us is saintly, but somehow I had formed the belief years ago that Freud was different from the rest of us. I imagined that he (unlike myself) had through psychological insight acceded to a plane above the baser temptations. I hoped to heaven the accusations in Hall's letter were false, but they had that degree of detail that imparts the ring of truth.

'There is no need for me to read the letter privately,' said Freud. 'Tell us what has been said against me. I have no secrets from anyone here.'

I started with the least of the charges: 'You are said not to be married to the woman you live with, although you hold her out to the world as your wife.'

'But that's not Freud,' cried Brill. 'It's Jones.'

'I beg your pardon,' Jones replied indignantly.

'Oh, come, Jones,' Brill said. 'Everyone knows you're not married to Loe.'

'Freud not married,' said Jones, looking behind his left shoulder. 'How absurd.'

'What else?' asked Freud.

'That you were discharged from employment at a respected hospital,' I continued, awkwardly, 'because you would not stop discussing sexual fantasies with twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls, who were in the hospital for the treatment of purely physical, not nervous, conditions.'

'But it's Jones they're talking about!' exclaimed Brill.

Jones had taken a sudden and minute interest in the architecture of Brill's apartment building.

'That you have been sued by the husband of one of your female patients and shot at by another,' I said.

'Jones again!' Brill called out.

'That you are currently having a sexual affair,' I went on, 'with your teenage housekeeper.'

Brill looked from Freud to me to Ferenczi to Jones, who was now gazing skyward, apparently studying the migratory patterns of Manhattan's avian species. 'Ernest?' said Brill. 'Surely you're not. Tell us you're not.'

A series of musical throat-clearing noises came from Jones, but no verbal response.

'You're disgusting,' Brill said to Jones. 'Really disgusting.'

'Is that the end of them, Younger?' asked Freud.

'No, sir,' I answered. The final allegation was the worst of all. 'There is one more: that you are currently engaged in another sexual liaison, this one with a patient of yours, a nineteen-year-old Russian girl, a medical student. Your affair is said to be so notorious that the girl's mother wrote you, begging you not to ruin her daughter. The dossier claims to reproduce the letter you wrote the mother in reply. In your letter, or what they say is your letter, you demand money from the mother in exchange for – for refraining from further sexual relations with the patient.'

After I had finished, no one spoke for a considerable time. At last Ferenczi burst out, 'But that one's Jung, for heaven's sake!'

'Sandor!' Freud rejoined sharply.

'Jung wrote that?' asked Brill. 'To a patient's mother?'

Ferenczi threw his hand over his mouth. 'Oop,' he said. 'But, Freud, you can't let them think it's you. They are going to tell newspapers. I am imagining headlines already.'

I was too: FREUD CLEARED OF ALL CHARGES.

'So,' Brill mused darkly, 'we are under attack in Boston, in Worcester, and New York at the same time. It cannot be a coincidence.'

'What is attack in New York?' asked Ferenczi.

'The Jeremiah and Sodom and Gomorrah business,' Brill answered, irritably. 'Those two messages weren't the only ones I've received. There have been many.'

We were all surprised and asked Brill to explain.

'It began right after I started translating Freud's hysteria book,' he said. 'How they knew I was doing it is a mystery. But the very week I started, I received the first one, and it's been getting worse ever since. They turn up when I least expect them. I am being threatened, I feel sure of it. Every time it's some murderous biblical passage – always about Jews and lust and fire. It makes me think of a pogrom.'

No one sought to obstruct Littlemore this time as he climbed the stairs at 782 Eighth Avenue. It was four o'clock – dinner preparation hour at the restaurant, from which came shrieks of Cantonese, punctuated by the sizzling hiss of chicken parts plunged into burning oil. Littlemore, who hadn't eaten since morning, wouldn't have minded some pork chop suey himself. He felt eyes upon him at every landing but saw no one. He heard someone running in a hallway above and a whispering of voices. At Apartment 4C, his knock yielded the same result it had before: nothing but the sound of hurried footfalls retreating down the back stairs.

Littlemore looked at his watch. He lit a cigarette to combat the odors wafting through the corridor, hoping he would get to Betty's in time to ask her to dinner. A few minutes later, Officer John Reardon came trooping up the stairs with a submissive, frightened Chinese man in tow. 'Just like you said, Detective,' said Officer Reardon. 'Barreled out the back door like his pants were on fire.'

Littlemore surveyed the miserable Chong Sing. 'Don't want to talk to me, Mr Chong, do you?' he asked. 'Suppose we have a look around your place. Open up.'

Chong Sing was much shorter than Littlemore or Reardon. He was of stocky build, with a flat, broad nose and rutted skin. He gestured helplessly, trying to indicate that he spoke no English.

'Open it,' Littlemore commanded, banging on the locked door.

The Chinaman produced a key and opened the door. His one-room apartment was a model of order and cleanliness. There was not a mote of dust or a teacup out of place. Two low cots, with seedy coverings, apparently did triple duty as beds, sofas, and tables. The walls were bare. Several sets of incense sticks burned in one corner, giving an acrid tang to the hot, motionless air.

'All cleaned up for us,' said Littlemore, taking it in. 'Thoughtful. Missed a spot, though.' With an uptick of his chin, Littlemore signaled overhead. Both Chong Sing and Officer Reardon looked up. On the low ceiling was a thick blackish smudge, almost three feet in length, over each of the two cots.

'What's that?' asked the policeman.

'Smoke stain,' answered Littlemore. 'Opium. Jack, you notice anything funny about that window?'

Reardon glanced at the room's one small casement window, which was closed. 'No. What about it?' he asked.

'It's closed,' answered Littlemore. 'A hundred degrees, and the window's closed. See what's outside.'

Reardon opened the window and leaned out into a narrow airshaft. He returned with an armful of items he found on a ledge underneath: a glass-covered oil lamp, half a dozen long pipes, bowls, and a needle. Chong Sing appeared to be in complete confusion, shaking his head,

looking from the detective to the police officer and back to the detective.

'You run an opium joint here, don't you, Mr Chong?' said the detective. 'You ever go up to. Miss Riverford's apartment at the Balmoral?'

'Hah?' said Chong Sing, shrugging helplessly.

'How'd you get red clay on your shoes?' the detective persevered.

'Hah?'

'Jack,' said Littlemore, 'take Mr Chong to the lock-up at Forty-seventh. Tell Captain Post he's an opium dealer.'

When Officer Reardon seized him by the arm, Chong spoke at last. 'Wait. I tell you. I only live in apartment in daytime. I don't know opium. I never see opium before.'

'Sure,' said Littlemore. 'Get him out of here, Jack.'

'Hokay, hokay,' said Chong. 'I tell you who sells opium. Hokay?'

'Get him out of here,' said the detective.

At the sight of Reardon's handcuffs, Chong cried out, 'Wait! I tell you something else. I show you something. You follow me hallway. I show you what you looking for.'

Chong's voice had changed. He sounded genuinely afraid now. Littlemore signaled Reardon to let Chong precede them into the dark, narrow corridor. From two flights below, the clattering of the restaurant could still be heard, and as they followed the Chinaman down the hall, past the stairwell, Littlemore began to hear the twanging, dissonant chords of Chinese string music. The smell of meat grew stronger. Every door was slivered open to allow the residents within to observe the goings-on – every door but one. The lone closed door belonged to the room at the farthest end of the corridor. Here Chong stopped. 'Inside,' he said. 'Inside.'

'Who lives here?' asked the detective.

'My cousin,' said Chong. 'Leon. He live here before. Now no one.'

The door was locked. There was no response to Littlemore s knock, but the moment the detective got close enough to rap his knuckles, he knew the overpowering meat odor was not coming from the restaurant after all. He drew from his pocket two thin metal picks. Littlemore was adept with locked doors. He had this one open in short order.

The room, though identical in size, contrasted in every other way with Chong Sing's. Gaudy red ornaments adorned every surface. A dozen vases, large and small, were scattered about, most of them carved in the form of dragons and demons. On the windowsill was a lacquered rouge box, with a round face mirror perched behind it; on a dresser, a painted statuette of the Virgin and Child. Nearly every square inch of wall was covered with framed photographs, all depicting a Chinese man who himself offered a stark contrast to Chong Sing. The man in the photographs was tall and arrestingly handsome, with an aquiline nose and a smooth, unblemished complexion. He wore an American jacket, shirt, and tie. Nearly all the pictures showed this man with young women – different young women.

What most commanded attention, however, was a single massive object planted squarely in the center of the room: a large closed trunk. It was the kind of trunk that well- to-do travelers use, with leather sides and brass hinges. Its dimensions were these: two feet in height, two in depth, three in length. Coils of stiff awning rope bound it shut.

The air was fetid. Littlemore could hardly breathe. The Chinese music was coming from the room directly above them; the detective found it difficult to think. The trunk seemed, impossibly, to be rippling in the thick atmosphere. Littlemore opened his pocket knife. Officer Reardon had one too. Together, wordlessly, they approached the chest and began to saw at the heavy ropes. A crowd of Chinese, many with handkerchiefs pressed against their mouths, gathered at the doorway to watch.

'Put your knife away, Jack,' said Littlemore to Officer Reardon. 'Just keep your eye on Chong.'

The detective worked at the ropes. When he severed the last coil, the lid of the trunk burst open. Reardon staggered back, either from surprise or from the explosion of rank gas that escaped from the trunk's interior. Littlemore covered his mouth with his sleeve but remained where he was. Inside the chest were three things: a ladies' hat crowned with a stuffed bird; a thick stack of letters and envelopes tied together with string; and the crumpled body of a young woman, viciously decomposed, clad only in under- things, a silver pendant on her chest and a white silk tie tightly wound around her neck.

Officer Reardon was no longer keeping an eye on Chong Sing. Instead he was close to passing out. Seeing this, Chong slipped back into the crowd of murmuring Chinese and out the open door.

We trudged silently up the four flights of stairs to Brill's apartment, each of us wondering, I assume, how to respond to the difficulties in Worcester. We had several hours to spend before a dinner party to which Smith Jelliffe, Brill's publisher, had invited us. At the fifth-floor landing, Ferenczi commented on a peculiar smell of burning leaves or paper. 'Someone is maybe cremating a dead person in their kitchen?' he suggested helpfully.

Brill opened his door. What we saw inside was unexpected.

It was snowing inside Brill's apartment – or seemed to be. A fine white dust drifted about the room, swirling in the air currents created by our opening the door; the floor was covered with the stuff. All of Brill's books, together with the tables, windowsills, and chairs, were coated. The smell of fire was everywhere. Rose Brill stood in the middle of the room with broom and dustpan, covered head to foot in a white rime, sweeping up as much as she could.

'I just got here,' she cried. 'Shut the door, for heaven's sake. What is it?'

I gathered some in my hands. 'It's ash,' I said.

'You left something cooking?' Ferenczi asked her.

'Nothing,' she answered, brushing the white grains from her eyes.

'Someone put it here,' said Brill. He wandered about the room in a trance, his hands outstretched before him, alternately grabbing at the ash and waving it away. Suddenly he turned to Rose. 'Look at her. Look at her.'

'What is it?' asked Freud.

'She's a pillar of salt.'

When Captain Post arrived with reinforcements from the West Forty-seventh Street station, he ordered – over Detective Littlemore's objections – the arrest of a half dozen Chinese men at 782 Eighth Avenue, including the manager of the restaurant and two patrons who had the misfortune to come upstairs to see what the commotion was. The body was carted off to the morgue and a double manhunt begun.

Littlemore's first thought was that he had found Elizabeth Riverford's missing corpse, but there was too much decomposition. He was no pathologist, but he doubted Miss Riverford, murdered on Sunday night, could have putrefied so thoroughly by Wednesday. Mr Hugel, thought Littlemore, would know for sure.

Meanwhile, the detective went through the letters he had found inside the trunk. They were love letters, more than thirty of them. All began Dearest Leon; all were signed Elsie. Neighbors differed on the name of the room's inhabitant. Some called him Leon Ling; others said he went by William Leon. He managed a Chinatown restaurant, but no one had seen him for a month. He spoke excellent English and wore only American suits.

Littlemore examined the photographs hanging on the walls. The building's occupants confirmed that the man in the pictures was Leon, but they did not know or would not say who the women were. Littlemore noticed that every single woman was white. Then he noticed something else.

The detective took down one of the photographs. It showed Leon standing, smiling, between two very attractive young women. At first the detective thought he must be mistaken. When he was convinced he was not, he put the picture into his vest pocket, made an arrangement to meet Captain Post the next day, and left the building.

The late afternoon air was still uncomfortably hot and muggy, but it was like a heavenly garden compared to the chamber from which Littlemore emerged. It was just past five when he got to Betty's apartment. She wasn't home. Her mother tried frantically to make the detective understand where 'Benedetta' was, but as the woman was speaking Italian, and rapidly at that, he could make neither heads nor tails of it. At last, one of Betty's little brothers came to the door and translated: Betty was in jail.

All Mrs Longobardi knew – because a nice Jewish girl had come to tell her – was that there had been trouble at the factory where Betty started work today. Some of the girls had been taken away, including Betty. 'Taken away?' asked Littlemore. 'Where?'

The mother didn't know.

Littlemore ran to the Fifty-ninth Street subway station. He stood all the way downtown, too worked up to take a seat. At police headquarters, he learned that strikers had hit one of the big garment factories in Greenwich Village, picketers had started smashing windows, and the police had arrested the worst couple dozen of them to clear the streets. All the rowdies were now in jail. The men were being held in the Tombs, the girls at the Jefferson Market.

Chapter Fourteen

In the 1870s, a fanciful profusion of Victorian high Gothic sprang up on a triangular plot of land at the corner of Tenth Street and Sixth Avenue, contrasting incongruously with the otherwise disreputable workingman's neighborhood. The new polychromatic courthouse was a jumble of steeply sloping roofs, with gables and pinnacles jutting out at every height and angle; its watchtower was crowned by a 170-foot turret. A five-floor prison in the same style was attached to this courthouse, and to the jail was attached another grand edifice, which housed a marketplace. Collectively, the place was known as Jefferson Market; the conceit was that institutions of law and order ought not to be sequestered from those of daily life.

By day, criminal cases of great import were tried in the Jefferson Market courthouse. After hours, the same tribunal became the city's Night Court, where vice cases were processed. As a result, the Jefferson Market jail was occupied largely by prostitutes awaiting disposition and punishment. It was here, in this jail, that Littlemore found a frazzled but unhurt Betty on Wednesday evening.

She was in a large, crowded holding cell in the basement. Some twenty-five or thirty women were detained within, standing in small knots or sitting on long narrow benches against the walls.

The cell was divided between two classes of prisoner. There were about fifteen young women in working outfits like Betty's – simple dark, solid-colored skirts, down to their ankles, of course, and white long-sleeved blouses. These prisoners were from the shirtwaist factory where Betty had for half a day been an employee. A few of these girls were as young as thirteen.

Their colleagues were another dozen women, of various ages and far more colorful in their accoutrements and cosmetics. Most were loud and conspicuously at their ease, being familiar with the surroundings. One, however, was louder than the others, complaining to the guards and demanding to know how a woman in her circumstances could be kept in jail. Littlemore recognized her at once; it was Mrs Susan Merrill. She was the only one with a chair, which the others had deferentially yielded to her. Over her shoulders was a burgundy wrap, in her arms a baby, sleeping peacefully despite the uproar.

Littlemore's badge got him inside the jailhouse, but it couldn't get Betty out. They stood only a few inches from each other, separated by the floor-to-ceiling iron bars, speaking quietly. 'Your first day of work, Betty,' Littlemore said, 'and you went on strike?'

She had not gone on strike. When Betty arrived at the factory that morning, she went directly to the ninth floor and joined a hundred other girls sewing. There were, however, at least fifty empty stools in front of idle sewing machines. What had happened was this: the day before, a hundred fifty seamstresses had been fired for being 'union sympathizers.' That evening, in response, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union called a strike against Betty's factory. As the next morning wore on, a small band of laborers and unionists gathered in the street below, shouting up to the workers on the floors above.

'They called us scabs,' Betty explained. 'Now I know why they hired me so quick – they were replacing the union girls. I couldn't be a scab, Jimmy, could I?'

'I guess not,' said Littlemore, 'but what did they want to go and strike for anyway?'

'Oh, you wouldn't believe it. First of all, it's hot, like a furnace. Then they charge the girls rent – for everything: lockers, sewing machines, needles, stools to sit on. You don't get half the pay they promise you. Jimmy, there was a girl there worked seventy-two hours last week, and she made three dollars. Three dollars! That's – that's – how much is that?'

'Four cents an hour,' said Littlemore. 'That's bad.'

'And that's not the worst thing either. They lock all the doors to keep the girls working; you can't even go to the bathroom.'

'Geez, Betty, you should have just left. You didn't have to go and picket, with people smashing windows and all.'

Betty was half indignant, half confused. 'I didn't picket, Jimmy.'

'Well, what did they arrest you for?'

' 'Cause I quit. They told us we'd go to jail if we quit, but I didn't believe them. And nobody was smashing windows. The policemen were just beating people up.'

'Those weren't policemen.'

'Oh, yes, they were.'

'Oh, boy,' said Littlemore. 'I got to get you out of here.' He beckoned to one of the guards and explained to him that Betty was his girl and wasn't part of the strike at all; she was in the lockup by mistake. At the words 'my girl,' Betty looked down at the floor and smiled with embarrassment.

The guard, a pal of Littlemore's, answered penitently that his hands were tied. 'It ain't me, Jimmy,' he said. 'You got to talk to Becker.'

'Beck?' asked Littlemore, his eyes lighting up. 'Is Beck here?'

The guard led Littlemore down the hall to a room where five men were drinking, smoking, and playing a noisy game of cards beneath a flickering electric bulb. One of them was Sergeant Charles Becker, a bullet-headed fireplug of a man with a powerful baritone. Becker, a fifteen-year veteran on the force, worked the most vice-ridden precinct in Manhattan, the Tenderloin, where the city's glittering casinos and brothels, including Susan Merrill's, mixed with the gaudiest lobster palaces and vaudevilles. Becker's presence at the jail was a stroke of good fortune for Littlemore, who had spent six months as a beat officer in Becker's squad.

'Hey, Beck,' Littlemore called out.

'Littlemouse!' boomed Becker, dealing cards. 'Boys, meet my little brother detective from downtown. Jimmy, this here's Gyp, Whitey, Lefty, and Dago – you remember Dago, don't you?'

'Dago,' said the detective.

'Couple two-three years ago,' Becker told his cronies, referring to Littlemore, 'this guy solves a pump-and-jump for me. Hands me the perp' – this was pronounced poyp - 'who's been paying the price ever since. They always pay the price, boys. What you doing here, Jimmy, bird- watching?'

Becker heard him out, nodding, never taking his eyes from the poker table. With the roar of a man who savors a grand display of magnanimity, he ordered the guards to let out the detective's bird. Littlemore thanked Becker profoundly and hurried back to the cell, where he collected Betty. On their way out, Littlemore poked his head into the card room and thanked Becker again. 'Say, Beck,' he said. 'One more favor?'

'Name it, little brother,' replied Becker.

'There's a lady in there with a baby. Any chance we could let her out too?'

Becker stubbed out a cigarette. His voice remained casual, but the jocularity of Becker's cronies suddenly came to a halt. 'A lady?' asked Becker.

Littlemore knew something was wrong, but he didn't know what.

'He's talking about Susie, boss,' said Gyp, whose real name was Horowitz.

'Susie? Susie Merrill's not in my jail, is she, Whitey?' said Becker.

'She's in there, boss,' answered Whitey, whose real name was Seidenschner.

'You got something going with Susie, Jimmy?'

'No, Beck,' said Littlemore. 'I just thought – with her having a baby and all -'

'Uh-huh,' said Becker.

'Forget I said it,' Littlemore put in. 'I mean, if she -'

Becker bellowed to the guards to let Susie out. He added to this command several choice imprecations, expressing outrage at a baby's being locked up in his jail and yelling that if there was 'any more babes' in the lockup in future, they should be brought directly to him. This remark produced a gale of laughter from his crew. Littlemore decided he had better go. He thanked Becker a third time – this one generating no reply – and led Betty away.

Tenth Street was nearly deserted. A breeze stirred from the west. On the jailhouse steps, in the shadow of the massive Victorian edifice, Betty stopped. 'Do you know that woman?' she asked. 'The one with the baby?'

'Kind of.'

'But, Jimmy, she's a – she's a madam.'

'I know,' said Littlemore, grinning. 'I've been to her place.'

Betty slapped the detective across the jaw.

'Ow,' said Littlemore. 'I only went there to ask her some questions about the Riverford murder.'

'Oh, Jimmy, why didn't you say so?' asked Betty. She put her hands to her face, then his. She smiled. 'I'm sorry.'

They embraced. They were still embracing a minute later, when the heavy oaken doors to the jail creaked open and a shaft of light fell on them. Susan Merrill was in the doorway, burdened with the baby and a hat of enormous proportions. Littlemore helped her out the door. Betty asked to hold the baby, whom the older woman willingly gave over.

'So you're the one who sprung me,' Susie said to Littlemore. 'I guess you figure I owe you something now?'

'No, ma'am.'

Susie cocked her head to get a better look at the detective. Reclaiming the baby from Betty, she said, in a whisper so faint Littlemore could hardly hear it, 'You're going to get yourself killed.'

Neither Littlemore nor Betty responded.

'I know who you're looking for,' Susie went on, the words barely audible. 'March 18, 1907.'

'What?'

'I know who, and I know what. You don't know, but I know. I ain't doing nothin' for free, though.'

'What about March 18, 1907?'

'You find out. And you get him,' she hissed, with a venom so violent she put a hand over the baby's face as if to protect her from it.

'What about that day?' Littlemore pressed again.

'Ask next door,' whispered Susie Merrill, before disappearing into the gathering dusk.

Rose swept us out of the apartment – a kindness on her part. She certainly didn't want Freud involved in cleaning up. As for Brill, he looked as numb as a soldier with DaCosta's syndrome. He would not be coming to dinner, he said, and asked us to make an excuse for him.

Jones took the subway to his hotel, which was farther downtown and less expensive than ours, while Freud, Ferenczi, and I decided to walk to the Manhattan, cutting through the park to do so. It is extraordinary how empty New York City's largest park can be in the evening. At first we traded hypotheses about the extraordinary scene in Brill's apartment; then Freud asked Ferenczi and me how he ought to reply to President Hall's letter.

Ferenczi declared that we must send a denial at once, preferably by wire, explaining that the misconduct alleged against Freud was actually committed by Jones and Jung. The only question, as Ferenczi saw it, was whether Hall would take our word for it.

'You know Hall, Younger,' said Freud. 'What is your opinion?'

'President Hall would accept our word,' I answered, meaning that he would accept mine. 'But I have been wondering, Dr Freud, whether that might not be precisely what they want you to do.'

'Who?' asked Ferenczi.

'Whoever is behind this,' I said.

'I am not following,' said Ferenczi.

'I see what Younger means,' Freud replied. 'Whoever did this must know these allegations concern Jones and Jung, not myself. So: they induce me to incriminate my friends, at which point Hall can no longer say he is confronted by mere rumor. On the contrary, I will have corroborated the accusation, and Hall will be obliged to take responsible measures. Possibly he bars Jones and Jung from speaking next week. I keep my lectures, at the expense of disgracing two of my followers – the two best placed to carry my ideas to the world.'

'But you cannot say nothing,' Ferenczi protested, 'as if you are guilty party.'

Freud considered. 'We will deny the charges – but that is all we will do. I will send Hall a short letter stating the facts: I am married, I have never been dismissed from employment at any hospital, I have never been shot at, and so on. Younger, will that put you in an awkward position?'

I understood his question. He wanted to know if I would feel bound to inform Hall that while Freud was innocent of the charges, Jones and Jung were not. Naturally, I would do no such thing. 'Not at all, sir,' I answered.

'Good,' Freud concluded. 'After that, we leave it to Hall. If, for the sake of this "handsome donation," Hall is prepared to keep the truths of psychoanalysis from being taught at his university, then – you will forgive me, Younger – he is not an ally worth having, and America can go to the dogs.'

'President Hall will never agree to their terms,' I said, with greater conviction than I felt.

Outside the Jefferson Market jail, Betty Longobardi had five words for Jimmy Littlemore. 'Let's get out of here.'

Littlemore was not so eager to leave. He led Betty toward Sixth Avenue, with its river of men and women streaming north on their way home from work. At the corner, a few steps from the ornate courthouse entrance, Littlemore stopped and wouldn't budge. Over the earthshaking roar of an elevated train, he told Betty excitedly about his eventful day.

'She said you were going to get killed, Jimmy,' was Betty's reply, which struck Littlemore as less appreciative of his achievements than he had hoped.

'She also said we should ask next door,' he answered. 'It's got to be the courthouse. Come on; we're right here.'

'I don't want to.'

'It's a courthouse, Betty. Nothing can happen in a courthouse.'

Back inside, Littlemore showed his badge to the clerk, who told them where the records office was but expressed the opinion that nobody was likely to be there at this hour. After climbing up two flights of stairs and working their way through an empty maze of corridors, Littlemore and Betty came upon a door marked records. The door was locked, the room behind it dark. Breaking and entering was not the detective's ordinary modus operandi, but under the circumstances he felt justified. Betty glanced around nervously.

Littlemore jimmied the lock. Shutting the door behind them, he switched on an electric lamp. They were in a small office with one large desk. There was a rear exit. This was unlocked; it opened onto a more capacious storeroom. Here they saw cabinet after cabinet of labeled drawers. 'There are no dates,' said Betty. 'Only letters.'

'There'll be a calendar,' said Littlemore. 'There's always a calendar. Wait till I find it.'

It did not take him long. He returned to the desk, where there were two typewriters, blotters, inkwells – and a stack of leather-bound ledgers, each more than two feet in width. Littlemore opened the first one. Every page within represented a day in the life of the New York Supreme Court, Trial Term, Parts I through III. The pages that Littlemore flipped through all indicated dates in 1909. He opened the second ledger, which proved to be the calendar of 1908, and then the third. Leafing through its pages, he quickly came to March 18, 1907. He saw dozens of lines of case names and numbers, set down by a practiced hand in pen and ink, often crossed out or overwritten. He read aloud:

'Ten-fifteen a.m., day calendar, Part III: Wells v. Interborough R. T. Co. Truax, J. Okay, Wells. We've got to find Wells.' He rushed past Betty back to the storeroom, where in a drawer marked w he found the case of Wells v. IRT: a paper-clipped set of three pages. He looked through them. 'This is nothing,' he said. 'Maybe some subway accident. They never even got to court.'

He went back to the ledger. 'Bernstein v. same,' he read. 'Mensinub v. same. Selxas v. same. Boy, there's at least twenty of these IRT cases. I guess we have to look through them all:

'Maybe those aren't what we're looking for, Jimmy. Isn't there anything else?'

'Ten-fifteen a.m., Trial Term: Tarbles v. Tarbles. A divorce?'

'Is that all?' asked Betty.

'Ten-thirty a.m., Trial Term, Part I, Criminal Term (January Term continued). Fitzgerald, J. People v. Harry K. Thaw.'

They stared at each other. Betty and Littlemore recognized the name at once, as would anyone else in New York and nearly anyone in the country at that time. 'He's the one – ' said Betty.

' – who murdered the architect at Madison Square Garden,' Littlemore finished. Then he realized why Betty had stopped: heavy treading could be heard down the hall.

'Who is that?' she whispered.

'Turn off the light,' Littlemore instructed Betty, who was standing next to the lamp. She reached under the shade and fiddled nervously with the buttons, but the result of her efforts was to switch on another bulb. The footsteps stopped. Then they resumed; they were now undoubtedly approaching the records office.

'Oh, no,' said Betty. 'Let's hide in the storeroom.'

'I don't think so,' said Littlemore.

The footsteps grew close, halting just outside their door. The knob turned, and the door swung open. It was a short man in a fedora and a cheap-looking three-piece suit, the inner breast pocket of which bulged as if he were carrying a gun. 'Ain't there no men's room?' he asked.

'Second floor,' said Littlemore.

'Thanks,' said the man, slamming the door behind him.

'Come on,' said Littlemore, heading back into the filing room. The case of People v. Thaw occupied a good two dozen drawers. Littlemore found the trial transcript: there were thousands of pages in four-inch sheafs, bound by rubber bands. The transcript was illegible in places, with uneven letters, no punctuation, and whole sentences of garbled words. For the date of March 18, 1907, there were only fifty or sixty pages. Littlemore, flipping through them, quickly came upon several sheets of paper that looked different from the others: cleanly typed, organized into separate paragraphs, well punctuated. 'An affidavit,' he said.

'Oh, my gosh,' Betty replied. 'Look!' She was pointing to the words grasped me by the throat and whip.

Littlemore hurriedly turned back to the affidavit's first page. It was dated October 27, 1903, and began, Evelyn Nesbit, being duly sworn, says –

'That's Thaw's wife, the showgirl,' said Betty. Evelyn Nesbit had been described by more than one infatuated author of the time as the most beautiful girl that ever lived. She married Harry Thaw in 1905, a year before Thaw killed Stanford White.

'Before she was his wife,' said Littlemore. They kept reading:

I reside at the Savoy Hotel, Fifth Avenue and Fifty- ninth Street, in the City of New York. I am 18 years of age, having been born on Christmas Day, in the year 1884.

For several months prior to June 1903,1 had been at Dr Bell's Hospital at West Thirty-third Street, where

I had an operation performed on me for appendicitis, and during the month of June went to Europe at the request of Henry Kendall Thaw. Mr Thaw and I traveled throughout Holland, stopping at various places to catch connecting trains, and then we went to Munich, Germany. We then traveled through the Bavarian Highlands, finally going to the Austrian Tyrol. During all this time the said Thaw and myself were known as husband and wife, and were represented by the said Thaw, and known, under the name of Mr and Mrs Dellis.

'The snake,' said Betty.

'Well, at least he married her later,' said Littlemore.

After traveling together about five or six weeks, the said Thaw rented a castle in the Austrian Tyrol, situated about halfway up a very isolated mountain. This castle must have been built centuries ago, as the rooms and windows are all old-fashioned. I was assigned a bedroom for my personal use.

The first night I was very tired, and went to bed right after dinner. In the morning I had breakfast with the said Thaw. After breakfast Mr Thaw said he wished to tell me something, and asked me to step into my bedroom. I entered the room, when the said Thaw, without any provocation, grasped me by the throat and tore the bathrobe from my body. The said Thaw was in a terrific excited condition. His eyes were glaring, and he had in his right hand a cowhide whip. He seized hold of me and threw me on the bed. I was powerless and attempted to scream, but the said Thaw placed his fingers in my mouth and tried to choke me.

He then, without any provocation, and without the slightest reason, began to inflict on me several severe and violent blows with the cowhide whip. So brutally did he assault me that my skin was cut and bruised. I besought him to desist, but he refused. He stopped every minute or so to rest, and then renewed his attack on me.

I was absolutely in fear of my life; the servants could not hear my outcries, for the reason that my voice did not penetrate through the large castle, and so could not come to my succor. The said Thaw threatened to kill me, and by reason of his brutal attack, as I have described, I was unable to move.

The following morning Thaw again came into my bedroom and administered a castigation similar to the day before. He took a cowhide whip and belabored me with it on my bare skin, cutting the skin and leaving me in a fainting condition. I swooned and did not know how long after I returned to consciousness.

'How horrible,' said Betty. 'But she married him – why?' 'For his dough, I guess,' said Littlemore. He leafed through the affidavit again. 'You think this is it? What Susie meant us to find?'

'It must be, Jimmy. It's the same thing that was done to poor Miss Riverford.'

'I know,' said Littlemore. 'But this is an affidavit. Does Susie seem like somebody who knows about affidavits?'

'What do you mean? It can't be a coincidence.'

'Why would she remember the day, the exact day, this affidavit got read in at the trial? It doesn't add up. I think there's something else.' Littlemore sat down on the floor, reading the transcript. Betty sighed impatiently. Suddenly the detective called out, 'Wait a minute. Here we go. Look at the Q here, Betty. That's the prosecutor, Mr Jerome, asking questions. Now look who the witness is, giving the answers.'

At the spot indicated by the detective, the transcript read as follows:

Q. What is your name?

A. Susan Merrill.

Q. State your business, please.

A. I keep a rooming house for gentlemen in Forty-third Street.

Q. Do you know Harry K. Thaw?

A. I do.

Q. When did you first meet him?

A. In 1903. He called on me to engage rooms. Which he did.

Q. For what purpose did he say?

A. He said he was engaging young ladies for work on the stage.

Q. Did he bring visitors to his rooms?

A. Mostly young women of fifteen years and on. They said they wanted to get on the stage.

Q. Did anything unusual happen at any time when any of these girls called?

A. Yes. One young girl had gone into his room. A little later, I heard screams and I ran into the room. She was tied to the bedpost. He had a whip in his right hand, and he was about to strike her. There were welts all over her.

Q. What was she wearing?

A. Very little.

Q. What happened next?

A. He was wild and hurried away. She told me he had been trying to murder her.

Q. Can you describe the whip?

A. It was a dog whip. On that occasion.

Q. Were there other occasions?

A. Another time there were two girls. One of them was undressed, the other was partly dressed. He was whipping them with a lady's riding whip.

Q. Did you ever speak with him about it?

A. Yes, I did. I told him these were all young girls and he had no right to whip them.

Q. What explanation did he make for doing it?

A. He made no explanation at all. He said they needed it.

Q. Did you ever inform the police?

A. No.

Q. Why not?

A. He said if I did he'd kill me.

Chapter Fifteen

'Come,' said Freud, changing the subject, as we walked through the park on our way from Brill's to the hotel. 'Let us hear how you are getting along with Miss Nora.'

I hesitated, but Freud assured me that I could speak as freely to Ferenczi as to himself, so I recounted the whole story at length: the illicit congress between Mr Acton and Mrs Banwell, glimpsed by the fourteen-year-old Nora, which Freud had somehow foreseen; the girl's tantrum in the hotel room, directed against me; the apparent recovery of her memory, identifying George Banwell as her assailant; and the sudden arrival of Banwell himself, together with the girl's parents and the mayor, who provided Banwell's alibi.

Ferenczi, after declaring his revulsion at the nature of the sexual act Mrs Banwell performed on Harcourt Acton – a reaction I found hard to understand, coming from a psychoanalyst – asked why Banwell couldn't have attacked Nora Acton even if he had not murdered the other girl. I explained that I had quizzed the detective on the very same point and that there was apparently physical evidence proving the two attacks were carried out by the same man.

'Let us leave the forensics to the police, shall we?' said Freud. 'If the analysis should help the police, well and good. If not, we shall at least help the patient. I have two questions for you, Younger. First, do you not find something strange in Nora's assertion that, when she saw Mrs Banwell with her father, she didn't understand at the time exactly what she was witnessing?'

'Most American girls of fourteen would be ill-informed on that point, Dr Freud.'

'I appreciate that,' Freud replied. 'But that is not what I meant. She implied that she now understood what she had witnessed, did she not?'

'Yes.'

'Would you expect a girl of seventeen to be better informed than one of fourteen?'

I began to take his point.

'How,' asked Freud, 'does she know now what she didn't know then?'

'She suggested to me yesterday,' I answered, 'that she reads books explicit in content.'

'Ah, yes, that's right, very good. Well, we must think more about this. But for now, my second question: tell me, Younger, why did she turn on you?'

'You mean, why did she throw her cup and saucer at me?'

'Yes,' said Freud.

'And hit you with boiling teapot,' added Ferenczi.

I had no answer.

'Ferenczi, can you enlighten our friend?'

'I am also in the dark,' Ferenczi replied. 'She is in love with him. That much is obvious.'

Freud addressed me. 'Think again. What did you say to her just before she became violent with you?'

'I had just finished the touching of her forehead,' I said, 'which failed. I sat down. I asked her to complete an analogy she had begun earlier. She was comparing the whiteness of Mrs Banwell's back to something else, but she broke off. I asked her to complete the thought.'

'Why?' asked Freud.

'Because, Dr Freud, you have written that whenever a patient begins a sentence, but interrupts himself and doesn't finish, a repression is at work.'

'Good boy,' said Freud. 'And how did Nora respond?'

'She told me to get out. Without warning. And then she began throwing things at me.'

'Just like that?' asked Freud.

'Yes.'

'So?'

Again I had no reply.

'Did it not occur to you that Nora would be jealous of any interest you showed in Clara Banwell? Particularly in her naked back?'

'Interest in Mrs Banwell?' I repeated. 'I've never met Mrs Banwell.'

'The unconscious does not take such niceties into account,' said Freud. 'Consider the facts. Nora had just described Clara Banwell performing fellatio on her father, which she witnessed at the age of fourteen. That act is of course repugnant to any decent person; it fills us with the utmost disgust. But Nora does not display to you any such disgust, despite implying that she fully understands the nature of the act. She even says she found Mrs Banwell's movements appealing. Now, it is quite impossible that Nora should have witnessed that scene without deep jealousy. A girl has a hard enough time bearing her own mother: she will never allow another woman to arouse her father's passion without bitterly resenting the intruder. Nora, therefore, envied Clara. She wanted to be the one performing fellatio on her father. The wish was repressed; she has nurtured it ever since.'

A moment ago, I had inwardly chastised Ferenczi for expressing revulsion at a 'deviant' sexual act – a revulsion I, for some reason, did not exactly share, despite Freud's remark about what all decent people feel. I had just been telling myself that every lesson taught by psychoanalysis undercut society's disapproval of so-called sexual deviance. Now, however, I found myself awash in a similar feeling. The wish Freud imputed to Miss Acton revolted me. Disgust is so reassuring; it feels like a moral proof. It is hard to let go of any moral sentiment anchored by disgust. We can't do it without setting our entire sense of right and wrong a-tremble, as if we were losing a plank that supported the whole fabric.

'At the same time,' Freud continued, 'Nora formed a plan to seduce Mr Banwell, in order to avenge herself on her father. That is why, only a few weeks later, Nora agreed to join Banwell alone on a rooftop to watch the fireworks. That is why she also walked with him alone by the shore of a romantic lake two years later. Probably she encouraged him with hints of interest all along, as any pretty young girl can easily do. How surprised he must have been when she rejected him – not once, but twice.'

'Which she did because true object of desire was her father,' Ferenczi put in. 'But still, why does she attack Younger?'

'Yes, why, Younger?' asked Freud.

'Because I stand in for her father?'

'Precisely. When you analyze her, you take his place. It is the predictable transferential reaction. As a result, Nora's unconscious desire is now to gratify Younger with her mouth and throat. This fantasy was preoccupying her when Younger approached her to touch her forehead. He told us, you will remember, that at that moment she began to undo her scarf. This gesture represented her invitation to Younger to take advantage of her. Here, I may add, is also the explanation of why the touching of her throat succeeded, whereas the touching of her forehead did not. But Younger rejected this invitation, telling her to retie her scarf. She felt rebuffed.'

'She did look offended,' I put in. 'I didn't know why.'

'Don't forget,' Freud continued, 'she is naturally vain about the injuries she has received. Otherwise she would not wear the scarf at all. So she was already sensitive about how you would react if you saw her neck or back. When you told her to keep her scarf on, you injured her. And when, shortly afterward, you brought up the subject of Clara Banwell's back, it was as if you had said to her, "It is Clara in whom I am interested, not you. It is Clara's back I want to see, not yours." Thus you unwittingly recapitulated her father's act of betrayal, provoking in the girl her sudden, otherwise inexplicable fury. Hence her violent attack – followed by a desire to give you her throat and mouth.'

'Irrefutable,' said Ferenczi, shaking his head in admiration.

Entering the drawing room of their house on Gramercy Park, Nora Acton informed her mother she would not sleep in her bedroom that night. Instead she would stay in the small first-floor parlor. From there, she could see the patrolman stationed outside. Otherwise, she said, she would not feel safe.

These were the first words Nora had addressed to either of her parents since leaving the hotel. When they arrived home, she had gone straight to her room. Dr Higginson had been called in, but Nora refused to see him. She also refused to come to dinner, declaring that she was not hungry. This was false; in fact she had not eaten since morning, when Mrs Biggs had prepared breakfast for her.

Mildred Acton, reclining on the drawing-room sofa and pronouncing herself exhausted, told her daughter she was being most unreasonable. With one police officer manning the front door and another the rear, how could there be any danger? In any event, Nora's spending the night in the parlor was out of the question. The neighbors would see her. What would they think? The family must do its best now to act as if there had been no disgrace.

'Mother,' said Nora, 'how can you say I've been disgraced?'

'Why, I said no such thing. Harcourt, did I say any such thing?'

'No, dear,' said Harcourt Acton, standing over a coffee table. He had been perusing five weeks of accumulated mail. 'Of course not.'

'I specifically said we must act as if you hadn't been disgraced,' her mother clarified.

'But I haven't,' said the girl.

'Don't be obtuse, Nora,' counseled her mother.

Nora sighed. 'What is that on your eye, Father?'

'Oh – polo accident,' explained Acton. 'Poked myself with my own stick. Stupid of me. You remember my old detached retina? Same eye. Can't see a deuced thing out of it now. How's that for bad luck?'

No one answered this question.

'Well,' said Acton, 'not compared with yours, Nora, of course, I didn't mean -'

'Don't sit there!' Mrs Acton called out to her husband, who was about to lower himself into an armchair. 'No, not there either. I had the chairs done just before we left.'

'But where am I to sit, dear?' asked Acton.

Nora closed her eyes. She turned to leave.

'Nora,' said her mother. 'What was the name of that college of yours?'

The girl stopped, her every muscle tense. 'Barnard,' she answered.

'Harcourt, we must contact them first thing tomorrow morning.'

'Why must you contact them?' asked Nora.

'To tell them you aren't coming, of course. It's quite impossible now. Dr Higginson says you must rest. I never approved in the first place. A college for young ladies! We never heard of such a thing in my time.'

Nora flushed. 'You can't.'

'I beg your pardon,' said Mrs Acton.

'I am going to be educated.'

'Did you hear that? She calls me uneducated,' Mrs Acton said to her husband. 'Not those glasses, Harcourt, use the ones on top.'

'Father?' asked Nora.

'Well, Nora,' said Acton, 'we must consider what is best for you.'

Nora looked at her parents with undisguised fury. She ran from the room and up the stairs, not stopping on the second floor, where her own bedroom was, or the third, but continuing all the way to the fourth, with its low ceilings and small quarters. There she ran straight into Mrs Biggs's bedroom and threw herself on the old woman's bed, burying her head in the rough pillowcase. If her father did

not let her go to Barnard, she told Mrs Biggs, she would run away.

Mrs Biggs did her best to comfort the girl. A good night's sleep, she said, would do a power. It was almost midnight when, at last, Nora consented to go to bed. To be sure she felt safe, Mrs Biggs saw to it that Mr Biggs was positioned on a chair outside Nora's bedroom door, with instructions to remain there the whole night through.

The old servant never once deserted his post that night, although he nodded off before too long. The police officers likewise remained on duty. Which made it quite surprising when, in the black of night, the girl suddenly felt a man's handkerchief pressing hard against her mouth and the cold, sharp edge of a blade on her neck.

Never having been to Jelliffe's home, I was unprepared for its extravagance. The word apartment was inapposite, unless one had in mind the phrase royal apartments, as for example at Versailles, which was evidently the dwelling Jelliffe intended to bring to mind. Blue Chinese porcelain, white marble statues, and exquisitely turned legs – highboy legs, davenport legs, credenza legs – were everywhere on display. If Jelliffe meant to convey to his guests an impression of personal wealth, he succeeded.

I knew Freud well enough by now to see he was repelled; the Bostonian in me had the same reaction. Ferenczi, by contrast, was unaffectedly overwhelmed by the splendor. I overheard him exchanging pleasantries with two elderly female guests in Jelliffe's living room before dinner, where servants offered us hors d'oeuvres from gold, not silver, trays. In his white suit, Ferenczi was the only man present not wearing black. It did not seem to discomfit him in the least.

'So much gold,' he said admiringly to the ladies: in the high ceding above us, heavenly plaster scenes were lined with gold leaf. 'It reminds me of our Operahaz, by Ybl, in Budapest. Have you been?'

Neither of the two ladies had. Indeed, they professed confusion. Hadn't Ferenczi just told them he came from Hungary?

'Yes, yes,' said Ferenczi. 'Oh, look at that little cherub in the corner, with the tiny grapes hanging out of his little mouth. Isn't he adorable?'

Freud was engrossed in conversation with James Hyslop, retired professor of logic at Columbia, who sported an ear trumpet the size of the horn on a Victrola talking machine. Jelliffe had attached himself to Charles Loomis Dana, the eminent neurologist and, unlike our host, a member of the same circles as my Aunt Mamie. In Boston, the Danas are royalty: Sons of Liberty, intimates of the Adamses, and so on. I knew one of Dana's distant cousins, a Miss Draper, from Newport, where she had more than once brought down the house with her impersonation of an old Jewish tailor. Jelliffe reminded me of a glad- handing senator. He had a look of high self-worth, carrying his impressive girth as if corpulence were next to manliness.

Jelliffe pulled me into his group, whom he was regaling with stories about his famous client, Harry Thaw, apparently living like a king in the hospital where he was confined. Jelliffe went so far as to say he would trade places with Thaw at the drop of a hat. What I drew from these remarks was that Jelliffe relished the celebrity of being Thaw's psychiatrist. 'Can you imagine?' he added. 'A year ago he had us all attesting to his insanity, to clear him of murder. Now he wants us to swear to his sanity to get him out of the asylum! And we shall get him out!'

Jelliffe roared with laughter, his arm around Dana's shoulder. Several of his listeners joined in; Dana decidedly did not. About a dozen guests, all told, were scattered about the room, but I understood that one more was expected. Soon enough, a butler opened the doors and preceded a woman into the room.

'Mrs Clara Banwell,' he announced.

'Can you psychoanalyze anyone, Dr Freud?' asked Mrs Banwell, as the party entered Jelliffe's dining room. 'Can you psychoanalyze me?'

On certain social occasions, otherwise dignified and serious men will begin behaving unconsciously like players on a stage, performing as they talk, acting as they gesticulate. The cause is invariably a woman; Clara Banwell produced that effect on Jelliffe's male guests. She was twenty- six, her skin the white of a powdered Japanese princess. Everything about her was perfectly formed. Her shape was exquisite. Her hair was forest-dark, her eyes sea-green, with the luster of a fine provoking intelligence. An iridescent Oriental pearl hung from each ear, and a single large pink conch pearl, encased in a basket of diamonds and platinum, hung below her neck on a silver thread. When she hinted at a smile – and she never more than hinted – men fell at her feet.

In 1909, the guests at a fashionable American dinner made a pairwise procession when called to table, every woman escorted on the arm of a man. Mrs Banwell was not on Freud's arm. She had lightly dropped her fingers on Younger's wrist at the decisive moment, but still she managed to address herself to Freud, while capturing the attention of the entire party as she did so.

Only that morning, Clara Banwell had returned to town from the country, in the same car with Mr and Mrs Harcourt Acton. Jelliffe had run into her in the lobby of their building quite by accident. The moment he learned that her husband, Mr George Banwell, was to be otherwise engaged, he begged Clara to attend his dinner that evening. He assured her she would find the guests most interesting. Jelliffe found Clara Banwell utterly irresistible – and her husband equally unbearable.

'What women want,' Freud replied to her question, as the guests took their seats at a table shimmering with crystal, 'is a mystery, as much to the analyst as to the poet. If only you could tell us, Mrs Banwell, but you cannot. You are the problem, but you are no better able to solve it than are we poor men. Now, what men want is almost always apparent. Our host, for example, instead of his spoon, has picked up his knife by mistake.'

All heads turned to the smiling, bulky form of Jelliffe at the head of the table. It was so: he had his knife – not his bread knife, but his dinner knife – in his right hand. 'What does that signify, Dr Freud?' asked an elderly lady.

'It signifies that Mrs Banwell has aroused our host's aggressive impulses,' said Freud. 'This aggression, arising from circumstances of sexual competition readily comprehensible to everyone, led his hand to the wrong instrument, revealing wishes of which he himself was unconscious.'

There was a murmur around the table.

'A touch, a touch, I do confess it,' cried Jelliffe with unembarrassed good spirits, wagging his knife in Clara's direction, 'except of course when he says that the wishes in question were unconscious.' His civilized scandalousness elicited a burst of appreciative laughter all around.

'By contrast,' Freud went on, 'my good friend Ferenczi here is fastidiously securing his napkin to his collar, as a bib is tucked into a child. He is appealing to your maternal instinct, Mrs Banwell.'

Ferenczi looked about the table with good-natured perplexity: only then did he notice that he was alone in this particular use of his dinner napkin.

'You conversed at length with my husband before dinner, Dr Freud,' said Mrs Hyslop, a grandmotherly woman seated next to Jelliffe. 'What did you learn about him?'

'Professor Hyslop,' replied Freud, 'will you confirm something for me, sir? You did not mention to me your mother's first name, did you?'

'What's that?' said Hyslop, holding his ear trumpet high.

'We didn't speak of your mother, did we?' asked Freud.

'Speak of Mother?' repeated Hyslop. 'Not at all.'

'Her name was Mary,' said Freud.

'How did you know that?' cried Hyslop. He looked accusingly around the table. 'How did he know that? I didn't tell him Mother's name.'

'You certainly did,' said Freud, 'without knowing it. The puzzle to me is your wife's name. Jelliffe tells me it is Alva. I confess I had predicted a variant of Mary. I felt quite certain of it. Thus I have a question for you, Mrs Hyslop, if you will permit me. Does your husband by any chance have a pet name by which he calls you?'

'Why, my middle name is Maria,' said a surprised Mrs Hyslop, 'and he has always called me Marie.'

At this admission, Jelliffe let out a whoop, and Freud received a round of applause.

'I woke up with a catarrh this morning,' interjected a matron across from Ferenczi. 'At the end of summer, too. Does that mean anything, Dr Freud?'

'A catarrh, madam?' Freud paused to consider. 'Sometimes a catarrh, I'm afraid, is only a catarrh.'

'But are women really so mysterious?' Clara Banwell resumed. 'I think you are being much too forgiving of my sex. What women want is the simplest thing in the world.' She turned to the exceedingly good-looking, dark-haired young man on her right, whose white bow tie was just slightly askew. He had said nothing so far. 'What do you think, Dr Younger? Can you tell us what a woman wants?'

Stratham Younger was having difficulty taking Clara Banwell's measure. Although he did not know it, he was laboring to put out of his mind a recurrent image of Mrs Banwell's lovely bare back, undulating gently in the moonlight as she tossed her hair over her shoulder. He was also having trouble separating the idea of Mrs George Banwell from that of Mr George Banwell, whom Younger could not stop thinking of as a murderer, despite the mayor's exculpation of him.

Younger believed that Nora was the loveliest girl he had ever seen. Yet Clara Banwell was quite nearly as attractive, if not more so. Desire in man, says Hegel, always begins with a desire for the other's desire. It was impossible for any man to look on Clara Banwell without wanting her to single him out, favor him, want something from him. Jelliffe, for example, would gladly have dived on a sword if Clara had only seen fit to grace him with a request to do so. On their way into the dining room, when Clara's hand had rested on his arm, Younger had felt the contact throughout his person. Yet there was something about her that distanced him too. Perhaps it was his having met Harcourt Acton. Younger did not consider himself a puritan, but the idea of Mrs Banwell gratifying so weak-looking a man insensibly provoked him.

'I'm sure, Mrs Banwell,' he replied, 'that if you would enlighten us on the subject of woman, it would be far more interesting than if I tried to.'

'I could tell you, I suppose, how women really feel about men,' said Clara invitingly. 'At least about the men they care for. Would you like that?' A groundswell of assent was heard around the table, at any rate among the male guests. 'But I won't, not unless you men promise to say how you really feel about women.' The bargain was promptly struck by general acclamation, although Younger held his tongue, as did Charles Dana at the foot of the table.

'Well, since you force me, gentlemen,' said Clara, 'I'll confess our secret. Women are men's inferiors. I know it is backward of me to say so, but to deny it is folly. All of mankind's riches, material and spiritual, are men's creations. Our towering cities, our science, art, and music – all built, discovered, painted, and composed by you men. Women know this. We cannot help being overmastered by stronger men, and we cannot help resenting you for it. A woman's love for a man is half animal passion and half hate. The more a woman loves a man, the more she hates him. If a man is worth having, he must be a woman's superior; if he is her superior, part of her must hate him. It is only in beauty we surpass you, and it is therefore no wonder that we worship beauty above all else. That is why a woman,' she wound up, 'is at her greatest peril in the presence of a beautiful man.'

Her audience was mesmerized, a reaction to which Clara Banwell was not unaccustomed. Younger felt she had thrown him the most fleeting glance at the very end of her remarks – he was not the only man at table who had this impression – but he told himself he had imagined it. It also occurred to Younger that Mrs Banwell might have just explained the wild extremes of conflicting emotion his own mother had displayed toward his father. Younger's father killed himself in 1904; his mother had not remarried. He wondered whether his mother had always both loved and hated his father, in the manner Mrs Banwell had described.

'Envy is certainly the predominant force in women's mental lives, Mrs Banwell,' said Freud. 'That is why women have so little sense of justice.'

'Men are not envious?' asked Clara.

'Men are ambitious,' he replied. 'Their envy derives chiefly from that source. A woman's envy, by contrast, is always erotic. The difference can be seen in daydreams. All of us daydream, of course. Men, however, have two kinds: erotic and ambitious. A woman's daydreams are exclusively erotic.'

'I am sure mine are not,' declared the rotund woman with the catarrh.

'I think Dr Freud is quite right,' said Clara Banwell, 'on all counts, but particularly about men's ambitiousness. My husband, George, for example. He is the perfect man. He is not at all beautiful. But he is handsome, twenty years older than I, successful, strong, single-minded, indomitable. For all those things, I love him. He also hasn't the slightest awareness that I exist, the moment I am out of his sight; his ambition is that strong. For that, I hate him. Nature requires me to. The happy consequence, however, is that I am free to do whatever I like – for example, being here tonight at one of Smith's delightful dinner parties – and George will never even know I left the apartment.'

'Clara,' responded Jelliffe, 'I'm wounded. You never told me you had such freedom.'

'I said I was free to do as I like, Smith,' Clara replied, 'not as you like.' Laughter again was general. 'Well, now I've confessed. What do the men say? Don't men secretly despise the bonds of marital fidelity? No, Smith, please; I know what you think. I'd like a more objective opinion. Dr Freud, is marriage a good thing?'

'For society or for the individual?' Freud responded. 'For society, marriage is undoubtedly beneficial. But the burdens of civilized morality are too heavy for many to bear. How long have you been a wife, Mrs Banwell?'

'I married George when I was nineteen,' Clara answered, and the thought of a nineteen-year-old Clara Banwell on her wedding night occupied the minds of several guests – not only of the male variety. 'That makes seven years.'

'In that case you will know enough,' Freud went on, 'if not from your own experience, then that of your friends, not to be surprised by what I say. Satisfying intercourse does not last long in most marriages. After four or five years, marriage tends to fail utterly in this respect, and when this happens it spells the end of spiritual communion too. As a result, in the great run of cases, marriage ends in disappointment, spiritual as well as physical. The man and the woman are thrown back, psychologically speaking, to their premarital state – with only one difference. They are poorer now. Poorer by the loss of an illusion.'

Clara Banwell stared intently at Freud.

'What is he saying?' old Professor Hyslop called out, trying to get his ear horn nearer to Freud.

'He is justifying adultery,' replied Charles Dana, speaking for the first time. 'You know, Dr Freud, apart from the parlor tricks, it is your focus on the maladies of sexual frustration that surprises me. Our problem is surely not that we place too much constraint on sexual license; it is that we place too little.'

'Oh?' said Freud.

'A billion people now live on this earth. A billion. And the number is growing geometrically. How are they to live, Dr Freud? What are they to eat? Millions flood our shores every year: the poorest, the least intelligent, the most prone to criminality. Our city is near anarchy because of them. Our jails are bursting. They breed like flies. And they steal from us. One cannot blame them; if a man is too poor to feed his children, he must steal. Yet you, Dr Freud, if I understand your ideas, seem concerned only with the evils of sexual repression. I would think a man of science ought to be more concerned with the dangers of sexual emancipation.'

'What do you propose, Charles, an end to immigration?' asked Jelliffe.

'Sterilization,' replied Dana sanguinely, dabbing a napkin to his mouth. 'The meanest farmer knows not to let his worst stock breed. Men are no more created equal than castle. If cattle were allowed to breed freely, we should have very poor meat indeed. Every immigrant to this country without means should be sterilized.'

'Not involuntarily, Charles, surely?' asked Mrs Hyslop.

'No one compels them to come here, Alva,' he replied. 'No one compels them to stay. How then can it be called involuntary? If they wish to reproduce, let them leave. What is involuntary is our being required to bear the charge of their unfit offspring, who end up as beggars and thieves. I make an exception, of course, for those who can pass an intelligence test. Splendid soup, Jelliffe, a true turtle, isn't it? Oh, I know, you will all say I am cruel and heartless. But I am only taking away their fertility. Dr Freud would take away something far more important.'

'What is that?' asked Clara.

'Their morality,' answered Dana. 'What sort of world would it be, Dr Freud, if your views became general? I can almost picture it. The lower orders come to scorn "civilized morality." Gratification becomes god. All join in rejecting discipline and self-denial, without which life has no dignity. The mob will run riot; why should they not? And this mob, what will they want when the rules of civilization are lifted? Do you think they will want only sex? They will want new rules. They will want to obey some new madman. They will want blood – your blood, probably, Dr Freud, if history is any guide. They will want to prove themselves superior, as the lowest always do. And they will kill to prove it. I picture bloodletting, great bloodletting, on a scale never seen before. You would pipe away civilized morality – the only thing that keeps man's brutality in check. What do you offer in exchange, Dr Freud? What will you put in its place?'

'Only the truth,' said Freud.

'The truth of Oedipus?' said Dana.

'Among others,' said Freud.

'A great deal of good it did him.'

A candle flickered at Nora Acton's bedside. The lamplight from Gramercy Park played palely at her curtains. The illumination was insufficient even to give a silhouette to the man whose presence Nora felt, rather than saw, inside her room. She wanted to cry out, but her mind would not operate on her body. It had somehow broken free, her mind, and was wandering off on its own. It or she seemed to float up from her own bed, rising toward the ceiling, leaving her small nightgowned body on the bed below.

Now she saw her assailant distinctly, but from above. Looking down on herself, she saw him remove the handkerchief from her face. She saw him dab a woman's red lipstick onto her sleeping, yielding mouth. Why would he put color on her lips? She liked how it looked; she had always wondered. What would the man do next? From above, Nora watched him light a cigarette in the flame of her bedside candle, place a knee against her supine form, and extinguish the glowing cigarette directly on her skin, down there, only an inch or two from her most private part.

Her body flinched against the knee that held her down. She saw it from above; she saw herself flinch. It was as if she were in pain. But she wasn't, was she? Observing everything from above, she felt nothing at all. And if she, watching herself, was not in pain, then there was no pain – there was no one else to feel it – was there?