Night Vision

by Paul Levine

  "Something like a pass prevent?"

  "More like an all-out blitz."

  My foot slipped off the gas pedal and I gaped at her, astounded.

  She shrugged. "I've done a little research on your game, that's all."

  "Why?"

  "To better understand you. Why do you suppose you derived pleasure from the smashing and hitting?"

  "Isn't my fifty minutes up, doctor?"

  "Please. Don't joke your way out of this. We're making progress concerning the omnipotence you felt from mastering your fear of pain and failure."

  "I never felt omnipotent getting blind-sided by the tight end."

  She settled back into her seat, annoyed. "Perhaps that's all we can accomplish for today."

  We sat in silence for a few moments, and then she pointed to the left to keep me from missing the turn toward Chipping Camden, ancestral home of the Maxson clan. If I'd stayed on the highway, we'd have headed straight for Stratford-on-Avon, and my mind wandered to Professor Prince and whether he ever played Hamlet in his meanderings.

  After a while Pam Maxson asked, "You don't want to explore what's under the surface, do you?"

  That started something buzzing in the back of my mind. What was it?

  "On the flight over here," I said, stirring up a fuzzy memory, "I dreamed about you."

  "Oh!" She straightened, tugging at the harness restraint. She was genuinely excited, whether from professional or personal curiosity I still didn't know.

  "Yes, but it's hard to remember. I fell asleep thinking about you and woke up the same way, and in between..."

  "Yes, yes. Think about it."

  "You were in Miami. You must have been, because it was very warm. And we were on the beach."

  She raised an eyebrow. "We?"

  "You and me. I was rigging a sailboard."

  She gave me a quizzical look.

  "A Windsurfer," I said. "It was one of those spring days, a strong warm wind from the east, whitecaps on the water, sand blowing down the beach. I was tying the boom to the mast, and you were next to me. Yes, I see it now, in a bikini!"

  "Indeed?"

  "A red bikini, and your hair was blowing downwind. And you were saying something. What the hell was it?"

  She didn't know and I didn't either, but I dredged it up, or was I making it up? Dreams are so fuzzy, who can tell? I thought of George in Virginia Woolf, unable, or unwilling, to distinguish truth from illusion. The thought was there, so I spit it out. "You said, 'Jake, I can't hold on.'"

  She leaned closer. "Hold on to what, or to whom?"

  I wrinkled my forehead and thought some more. "I don't know. That's all I can remember. But you were frightened, and so was I."

  "The sensation of falling is a common dream experience, but you seem to have transferred the anxiety to me. Quite interesting."

  She thought about it a while, so I concentrated on the road, which by now had shrunken to two undersized lanes. On either side were rolling farmlands, alternate patches of brown and green, an occasional herd of sheep grazing on grassy slopes. Tractors hauling plows chugged along the road, hogging both sides and crowding me toward the ditch on the left.

  After a few moments Pam Maxson said, "Freud wrote that dreams often express a repressed, unconscious wish from childhood."

  "Makes sense. Ever since puberty, I wanted to spend time with girls in bikinis."

  Her emerald glance chided me. "You're being too literal. The unconscious wish is repressed, so it cannot be given direct expression even in a dream. The dream must distort the wish, so the dreamer need not face the cost of recognizing the true wish, which has been disguised."

  "You're saying I don't really have a repressed desire to see you in a bikini on a windswept beach?"

  "No, but it represents something. The bikini may signify that you wish to see me stripped bare—"

  "I can buy that."

  "—Stripped of the barriers each of us erects to protect ourselves. The color red can signify violence or bloodshed. As for what you heard, perhaps you have a desire to see me fall, a metaphor for fail."

  "Why would I?"

  She considered it. "I don't know, are you somehow threatened by me?"

  "Intrigued, yes. Threatened, no. I'd like to get to know you. And not just in my dreams."

  She smiled and sat back, alone in her thoughts.

  ***

  It was slow going as I followed her directions up a winding road. The asphalt turned to gravel, and as the road narrowed and overgrown shrubs clawed at each side of the Rover, the surface became brown dirt, pocked by holes. After bouncing through a few of the axle breakers, I heard a stirring in the backseat. Charlie Riggs was stretching like a bearded cat.

  "There it is," Pam said, pointing up a hill.

  "Now, that didn't take long at all," Charlie mumbled, leaning over the front seat to take a peek.

  I pulled into a gravel driveway that led to a large limestone house topped by a thatched roof. Pam caught me staring at the shaggy top of her home. "Our insulation," she said. "The reeds are stacked a foot thick and nailed down by thousands of wooden stakes. Keeps us warm in the winter and cool in the summer. Only needs to be replaced every sixty years or so, but the fire insurance is quite exorbitant."

  "Splendid, just splendid," Charlie was saying.

  "Shall we?" Pam asked, gesturing toward the house. "I've told Mum all about you."

  "You, singular or plural?" I ventured.

  "Plural," she answered with the biggest smile to date. Then she darted close and kissed me. It wasn't a kiss that would lose a PG-rating in Hollywood. It was more of a whisk of lip across cheek, but my spirits soared to the top of the thatched roof where a weather vane pointed west. "Gracious," Pam said. "It's nearly tea time. Let's see if Mum still remembers how to make a Bakewell tart."

  We headed up a flagstone path to a huge front door. It came to me then, a nagging question from earlier in the day. "Why would the royal family be killing prostitutes?" I asked her.

  "It had to do with Prince Albert, called Eddy in the Court. He was the son of King Edward VII and Alexandra. He was in line to be king. But he was known to be bisexual, and there were scandals involving relationships with boys. Those were fairly easy to hush up. Not so easy was the rumor that he had surreptitiously married a young Catholic shop girl, who gave birth to a baby girl. The royal family is said to have spirited the shop girl off to an insane asylum, kidnapped the child, and forcibly returned Eddy to the Court. All was accomplished very efficiently, except there was a witness. A friend of the shop girl: Mary Jane Kelly."

  "The last Ripper victim," Charlie said.

  "Yes. She was an East End harlot."

  "But five women were killed," I said.

  "The others were the smoke screen, necessary to create the myth of a Ripper indiscriminately killing prostitutes."

  "The royal family had five women killed to protect the Prince's reputation?" I asked, incredulous.

  "It's one theory," Pamela said.

  "Bizarre," Charlie Riggs concluded.

  "Farfetched," I agreed, mulling it over. "As ridiculous as a state attorney killing a woman to protect his reputation as a war hero, then killing another to cover up the first."

  CHAPTER 23

  Tea Time

  An ancient clock above the marble fireplace bonged four times and a uniformed kitchen girl rolled a silver cart of scones, muffins, and crumpets into the drawing room. The walls were hung with gold silk damask and matched the festooned curtains. The floor was dark wood covered with a carpet of burgundy and gold. On the walls were grim portraits of Victorian folk, stout men with long tangled hair and pale women with swan necks.

  We sat on chairs with carved knees and ball-and-claw feet. Overhead was a cut-glass chandelier. Mrs. Penelope Maxson personally poured steaming tea from a china pot decorated with roses. She never took her eyes from mine as she handed me the cup and saucer with a steady hand. She was a trifle too large for the long, fitted silk chiffon dre
ss the color of a sapphire. White beads formed leaf-like shapes over the shoulder and down each sleeve. Red beads swirled like a cloud of dust over an ample hip. The dress was cut daringly low, and Mrs. Maxson threatened to spill over with the tea.

  She had a fine head of gray hair piled high, a long patrician nose, and green eyes she had graciously passed on to her daughter. "Lemon?" she asked, barely suppressing a smile. "They tell me you Yanks use lemon, though I haven't the foggiest idea why."

  Pamela smiled. "Some of them even drink their tea over ice."

  "No!" protested Mrs. Maxson, a twinkle in her eye. "Whatever for, to quell a fever?"

  "Philistines," I agreed, realizing they were putting me on. I declined the lemon and accepted a dash of milk.

  We made tea talk. Mrs. Maxson was too polite to ask why someone used my face for a soccer ball. Instead, she discussed the relative qualities of West Bengal Darjeeling compared with Russian. Charlie Riggs allowed as how he favored the smoky aroma of Lapsang souchong from the Fujian province because Darjeeling always reminded him of muscatel.

  I know more about Dutch beer than Chinese tea, so I kept quiet and watched Pamela, who sat regally on a stiff chair, her legs crossed demurely at the ankles, cup and saucer balanced daintily on her lap. She had changed into a summer sweater of white cotton and a long denim skirt. A tad casual for the formal room, perhaps, but it didn't bother me. I just admired the lady's ankles, as Victorian men must have done in similar rooms a century before. Mrs. Maxson seemed entranced by Charlie, who was waxing enthusiastic about the furniture, which, to me, looked like Early Flea Market.

  When he finally stopped talking, Charlie Riggs slathered clotted cream and strawberry jam onto a warm scone and inhaled the aroma of the sweet cakes and steaming tea. I hadn't seen him this happy since he had snookered a young public defender in a pretrial deposition in a homicide case.

  "And what was the cause of death?" the PD had asked.

  "Acute lead poisoning," Doc Riggs said with a straight face.

  The young lawyer could barely contain his joy. "Really?"

  "Yes, indeed. Of course it was caused by two .38 slugs in the heart from your client's gun."

  I forgave him later.

  Charlie bit into the scone and decorated his beard with a glob of the cream. Then he looked around the room, furrowed his bushy eyebrows, and said, "If I'm not mistaken, Mrs. Maxson, that sofa is Early Hepplewhite."

  "Quite right," she said, smiling. "About 1765, best we can tell."

  "And those too," Charlie said, gesturing toward gilt-wood armchairs, "perhaps a bit later."

  Mrs. Maxson nodded. "We've established them at 1790."

  This went on for a while. The cabinets on either side of the fireplace dated from 1795, the mahogany table with satinwood inlay about 1775, and the pianoforte—just like Beethoven's—was made in 1798 by Rolfe of Cheapside. I decided neither to comment on Rolfe's marketing strategy nor to bang out my risqué rendition of "Louie, Louie."

  "Would you care for a brandy snap?" Mrs. Maxson asked me.

  I scooped up a confection of ginger and whipping cream and washed it down with—who knows?—some Indian, Russian, or Chinese tea.

  "Pamela tells me you're a barrister," Mrs. Maxson said.

  I nodded, tipping my cup.

  "I've always adored the law," she said. "When Pamela was at Cheltenham Ladies' College, I so hoped she would pursue that noble profession."

  My smile was sincere. Where I come from, lawyers are called shysters, mouthpieces, or ambulance chasers.

  "Mother never approved of my life, nor I of hers," Pam said tartly.

  "Pamela!" Mrs. Maxson's smile dropped at the edges, giving her an odd, frozen look.

  "Mother can scarcely say 'psychiatry' without breaking out in hives."

  "It's not psychiatry I object to," Mrs. Maxson protested. "But in your practice, the people..."

  Pamela shrugged.

  "When I think back," her mother said a bit gloomily. "Mr. Maxson had just passed on, and Pamela was quite distraught, naturally. Then those poor girls were killed, right here in the Cotswolds, and Pamela was at such an impressionable age. Perhaps that explains how she chose such a...gruesome profession."

  "When I was studying psycholinguistics at Cambridge, Mother practically disowned me."

  "Kidnappers! Her specialty was kidnappers."

  "Ransom notes contain marvelous clues," Pam said. "I developed a computer program that analyzed every word of the note. The computer then compared how the words in the note are used compared to the same words in ordinary speech. Properly done, this yields signature words that reveal the kidnappers background."

  Mrs. Maxson shook her head. "I thought it was just a phase, that when she decided on medicine, it would be for a traditional career. Pediatrics perhaps. But she was a house woman, what you call, what is it, Pamela...?"

  "An intern."

  "Yes, at St. Thomas Hospital in London. Do you know it, Dr. Riggs?"

  "I believe Florence Nightingale worked there."

  "Yes." Mrs. Maxson nodded. "Then to Maudsley Hospital for psychiatry and Broadmoor for the criminally insane. One place worse than the next. Dealing with policemen and the deranged. Oh my, don't get me started. Perhaps if I'd raised her differently..."

  "I don't think she turned out half bad," I said, in a semi-chivalrous way.

  "Well, Mr. Lassiter, I ask you, should a young lady like this be spending her time in those horrible prisons?"

  "Hospitals, Mother!"

  "Hospitals, with cages over the windows and those awful squeaky floors..."

  "Linoleum," Pam said. "Mum hates linoleum."

  "Working the worst imaginable hours, how can a young woman even find a suitable husband? I mean when a man comes home from the office, he wants a good roast beef, not a repulsive story, isn't that right, Mr. Lassiter?"

  "Actually, I'm cutting back on red meat."

  "If a woman has no time to form relationships with men—"

  "But then," Pam interrupted, "you've made up for both of us, haven't you, Mother?"

  I heard the tinkle of china in Mrs. Maxson's hands. The afternoon sun slanted through the heavy windows, but the room had turned frosty. So this is what the English do at their genteel teas. Haul out the dirty linen.

  Mrs. Maxson straightened in her chair. Her face betrayed nothing, the perfect example of the stiff upper lip. "Pamela, no argie-bargie, not today."

  "As you wish, Mother."

  Mrs. Maxson managed a formal smile that reminded me of Nancy Reagan. "I won't say another word about it, but I'll never understand why a proper lady would want to soil her hands with that sort of work. Don't you agree, Mr. Lassiter?"

  "Well...I don't know," I sputtered. "Pam's work is very important. The day may come when she can re-create the personality, the emotional and mental makeup, the domestic situation, even the appearance of the psychopath."

  Pam gently placed her cup in its saucer on the side table. "How unexpectedly gallant. Rising to my defense when all this time you scoffed at my work."

  "Not so," I protested. "I always respected it, even if I didn't understand it."

  "Rapists!" Mrs. Maxson exclaimed, ignoring our byplay. "My daughter spent a year interviewing rapists in their cells. Can you imagine?"

  "I categorized them by their behavior," Pam explained impassively. "The angry, the socially inept, the sadomasochistic."

  "Sadists. So very sick," Mrs. Maxson chided.

  "All of us have the capacity to inflict pain," Pam said quietly.

  "Closet sadists?" I asked.

  "We are all born psychopaths, born without repressions," she said. "Society teaches us the restraints of proper behavior and helps us develop a conscience."

  I allowed Mrs. Maxson to pour me another cup of tea. "Some learn and some don't," I said.

  Pam said sternly, "And if the restraints come off, if society encourages antisocial behavior, we are only too willing to comply."

  Charlie Riggs sliced
himself a piece of fig loaf and said, "The Nazis are proof enough of that, burghers manning the ovens."

  "And on a lesser scale," Pam said, "the average man will inflict pain when it is acceptable to do so. In a college study thirty years ago, students were encouraged to give ever-increasing electric shocks to volunteers."

  Charlie nodded. "The Milgram study."

  The shocks were bogus," Pam continued, "but the students didn't know that, and they were only too happy to comply, even as the voltage increased and the volunteers writhed in apparent pain."

  "Homo homini lupus" Charlie said sadly. "'Man is a fox to man.'"

  We thought about that a moment, the shadows lengthening outside the gold-curtained windows. The mood of the afternoon tea had turned melancholy.

  "Well, I don't know how we got off on that ghastly subject," Mrs. Maxson said after a moment. "Perverts and monsters. How I resent all of them, including their psychiatrists, for blaming women for their evil. With the Yorkshire Ripper, they blamed his wife. With the Hungerford killer, his mother. Your profession, Pamela, is so...so..."

  "Misogynistic," Charlie offered.

  "Exactly!"

  "But then," Pam said, looking straight at dear old Mum, "it's difficult to overestimate the damage a mother can do."

  Mrs. Maxson sighed and carefully replaced her cup and saucer on the silver tray. They must have been down this road before. She smoothed an imaginary crumb from the shimmering blue dress and shifted in her chair as if the tea were coming to a close. "Dr. Riggs, may I offer you a last slice of mincemeat cake with the brandy-butter sauce?"

  Charlie patted his stomach and demurred, and Mrs. Maxson dispatched the pastry cart with a wave of the hand to her kitchen girl and told us we'd be having roast quail for dinner. I figured a five-mile run would be the prerequisite for that feast and would have made it, too, if a nap hadn't sounded so good. Mrs. Maxson showed me a room at the end of the second-floor corridor, and the four-poster practically invited me to drop in. The bed was high enough to store a steamer trunk underneath. Topside, it had a thick mattress, cool pink sheets, and high fluffy pillows.