'Unless he was standing on something,' said Littlemore.
'What?'
'On a stool or something.'
'On a stool?' repeated the coroner.
'It's possible,' said Littlemore.
'A man does not stand on a stool while whipping a girl, Detective.'
'Why not?'
'Because it's ridiculous. He would fall off.'
'Not if he had something to hold on to,' said the detective. 'A lamp, maybe, or a hat rack.'
'A hat rack?' said Hugel. 'Why would he do that, Detective?'
'To make us think he was taller.'
'How many homicide cases have you investigated?' asked the coroner.
'This is my first,' said Littlemore, with undisguised excitement, 'as a detective.'
Hugel nodded. 'You spoke with the maid at least, I suppose?'
'The maid?'
'Yes, the maid. Miss Riverford's maid. Did you ask her if she noticed anything unusual?'
'I don't think I — '
'I don't want you to think,' snapped the coroner. 'I want you to detect. Go back to the Balmoral and talk to that maid again. She was the first one in the room. Ask her to describe to you exactly what she saw when she went in. Get the details, do you hear me?'
On the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-third Street, in a room no woman had ever entered, not even to dust or beat the curtains, a butler poured from a sparkling decanter into three etched-crystal goblets. The bowls of these goblets were intricately carved and so deep they could hold an entire bottle of claret. The butler poured a quarter inch of red wine into each.
These glasses he offered to the Triumvirate.
The three men sat in deep leather armchairs arranged around a central fireplace. The room was a library containing more than thirty-seven hundred volumes, most of which were in Greek, Latin, or German. On one side of the unlit fireplace stood a bust of Aristotle atop a jade- green marble pedestal. On the other was a bust of an ancient Hindu. Over the mantel was an entablature: it displayed a large snake curled into a sine wave, against a background of flames. The word charaka was engraved in capital letters underneath.
Smoke from the men's pipes caressed the ceiling high above them. The man in the center of the three made a barely perceptible motion with his right hand, on which he wore a large and unusual silver ring. He was in his late fifties, elegant, gaunt in the face, and wiry in build, with dark eyes, black eyebrows below his silver hair, and the hands of a pianist.
In response to his sign, the butler put a spark to the hearth, causing a thick set of papers therein to catch and burn. The fireplace glowed and crackled with dancing orange flames. 'Be sure to preserve the ashes,' said the master to his servant.
Nodding his assent, the butler silently withdrew, closing the door behind him.
'There is only one way to fight fire,' continued the man with pianist's hands. He raised his goblet. 'Gentlemen.'
As the two other men raised their crystal glasses, an observer might have noticed that they also wore a similar silver ring on their right hands. One of these other two gentlemen was portly and red-cheeked, with muttonchop sideburns. He completed the elegant man's toast — 'With fire' — and drained his glass.
The third gentleman was balding, sharp-eyed, and thin. He said not a word but merely sipped his wine, a Chateau Lafite of the 1870 vintage.
'Do you know the Baron?' asked the elegant man, turning to this balding gentleman. 'I suppose you are related to him.'
'Rothschild?' the balding man replied blandly. 'I've never met him. Our ties are with the English branch.'
Chapter Three
For Freud's first destination in America, Brill chose Coney Island, of all places. We set off by foot for the Grand Central Station, just down the block from our hotel. The sky was cloudless, the sun already hot, the streets clogged with Monday morning traffic. Motorcars accelerated impatiently around horse-drawn delivery wagons. Conversation was impossible. Across from the hotel, on Forty-second Street, a colossal scaffold had been erected where a new building was going up, and the pneumatic drills set up a deafening clatter.
Inside the terminal, it was suddenly quiet. Freud and Ferenczi stopped in awe. We were in a fabulous glass and steel tunnel, six hundred fifty feet long and a hundred feet high, with massive gas-fueled chandeliers running the entire length of its curved ceiling. It was a feat of engineering far surpassing Mr Eiffel's tower in Paris. Only Jung seemed unimpressed. I wondered if he was well; he looked a little pale and distracted. Freud was shocked, as I had been, to learn they were about to tear the station down. But it was built for the old steam locomotives, and the era of steam had come to an end.
As we descended the stair to the IRT, Freud's mood blackened. 'He is terrified of your underground trains,' Ferenczi whispered in my ear. 'A bit of unanalyzed neurosis. He told me so last night.'
Freud's humor did not improve when our train lurched to a violent halt in a tunnel between stations, its lights flickering out, plunging us into a pitch, hot darkness. 'Buildings in the sky, trains in the earth,' said Freud, sounding irritated. 'It is Virgil with you Americans: if you cannot bring the heavens down, you are determined to raise hell.'
'That is your epigraph, no?' asked Ferenczi.
'Yes, but it was not supposed to be my epitaph,' answered Freud.
'Gentlemen!' Brill cried out without warning. 'You still haven't heard Younger's analysis of the paralyzed hand.'
'A case history?' said Ferenczi enthusiastically. 'We must hear it, by all means.'
'No, no. It was incomplete,' I said.
'Nonsense,' Brill upbraided me. 'It's one of the most perfect analyses I've ever heard. It confirms every tenet of psychoanalysis.'
Having little choice, I recounted my small success, as we waited in the stifling dark for the train to return to life.
I graduated from Harvard in 1908, with a degree not only in medicine but also in psychology. My professors, impressed by my industry, brought me to the attention of G. Stanley Hall, the first man ever to receive a Harvard psychology degree, a founder of the American Psychological Association, and now the president of Clark University in Worcester. Hall's ambition was to make the upstart, fabulously endowed Clark the leading institution of scientific research in the country. When he offered me a position as an assistant lecturer in psychology, with the ability to begin my medical practice — and get out of Boston — I accepted at once.
One month later, I had my first analytic patient: a girl, whom I shall call Priscilla, sixteen years old, delivered to my office by her distraught mother. Hall was responsible for the family's decision to bring her to me. More than that I can't say without revealing the girl's identity.
Priscilla was short and heavy but had a pleasing face and an uncomplaining character. For a year she had been suffering from bouts of acute shortness of breath, occasional incapacitating headache, and a total paralysis of her left hand — all of which baffled and embarrassed her. Hysteria was plainly indicated by the paralysis, which afflicted the whole of her hand, including the wrist. As Freud had pointed out, paralyses of this kind do not conform to any genuine derma- tone innervation and hence can claim no real physiological basis. For example, genuine neurological damage might cause certain fingers to be incapacitated, but not the wrist. Or the use of the thumb might be lost, leaving the other digits unaffected. But when a paralysis seizes an entire body part across all its differentiated neural reticulations, it is not physiology but psychology that must be consulted, for this kind of seizure corresponds solely to an idea, a mental image — in Priscilla's case, the image of her left hand.