'Perhaps,' he said. 'I concealed my worst self-doubts from my father for the whole of his lifetime. Like you.' Freud made the latter observation as if it were well known; in fact, I had not said a word about it to him. 'But there is always a neurotic ingredient in such concealment. Start on this point with Nora tomorrow, Younger. That is my advice. There is something in that country house. Undoubtedly it will be connected to the girl's unconscious desire for her father. I wonder.' He stopped walking and shut his eyes. A long moment passed. Then, opening his eyes, he said, 'I have it.'
'What?' I asked.
'Well, I have a suspicion, Younger, but I am not going to tell you what it is. I don't want to plant ideas in your head - or hers. Find out if she has a memory connected with this country house, a memory predating the episode on the roof. Remember, be opaque with her. You must be like a mirror, showing her nothing but what she shows you. Perhaps she saw something she should not have seen. She may not want to tell you. Don't let her off.'
On Tuesday, in the late afternoon, the Triumvirate were reassembled in the library. They had a great deal to discuss. One of the three gentlemen turned over, in his fine long hands, a report he had recently received and had shared with the others. The report included, among other things, a set of letters. 'These,' he said, 'we do not burn.'
'I told you: they are degenerates, all of them,' added the portly, ruddy-complexioned man next to him, with the muttonchop sideburns. 'We must wipe them out. One by one.'
'Oh, we will,' said the first. 'We are. But we will make use of them first.'
There was a brief silence. Then the third man, the balding one, spoke. 'What of the evidence?'
'There will be no evidence,' replied the first, 'except what we choose to leave behind.'
Detective Jimmy Littlemore exited the subway at Seventy- second Street and Broadway, the stop closest to the Balmoral. Mr Hugel might have his money on Banwell, but Littlemore hadn't given up on his own leads.
The evening before, when the Chinaman had disappeared, Littlemore had not been able to find out anything about him. The other laundry workers knew him as Chong, but that was all they knew about him. An assistant had
told him to come back in the daytime and ask for Mayhew, the bookkeeper.
Littlemore found Mayhew recording figures in a back office. The detective asked the bookkeeper about the Chinaman who worked in the laundry.
'Just penciling in his name now,' said Mayhew, without looking up.
'Because he didn't show up for work today?' asked Littlemore.
'How did you know that?'
'Lucky guess,' said the detective. Mayhew had the information he wanted. The Chinaman's full name was Chong Sing. His address was 782 Eighth Avenue, in Midtown. Littlemore asked if Mr Chong ever made laundry deliveries to the Alabaster Wing - more specifically, to Miss Riverford.
Mayhew looked amused. 'You can't be serious,' he said.
'Why not?'
'The man's Chinese.'
'So?'
'This is a first-class building, Detective. Normally we don't even hire Chinese. Chong was not allowed out of the basement. He was lucky to have a job here at all.'
'Bet he was real grateful,' said Littlemore. 'Why'd you hire him?'
Mayhew shrugged. 'I haven't any idea. Mr Banwell asked us to find work for him, and that is what we did. Evidently, he didn't realize how fortunate he was.'
Littlemore s next task was to find the cabbie who picked
up the black-haired man Sunday night. The doormen told the detective to try the stables on Amsterdam Avenue, where all the hacks got their horses. But they said he shouldn't bother going until later. The night drivers didn't come on until nine-thirty or ten.
The interval suited Littlemore just fine. It gave him a chance first to take another look at Miss Riverford's apartment and then to drop in on Betty. She was in a much better mood. Agreeing to come out to a nickelodeon, Betty introduced the detective to her mother and gave a goodbye hug to each of her little brothers - who gaped when the detective showed them his gun and who were delighted when he let them play with his badge and handcuffs. Betty, it turned out, had a new job. She had spent a luckless morning presenting herself at the large hotels, hoping vainly to find a spot for an experienced maid. But at a shirtwaist factory near Washington Square, she got an interview with the owner, a Mr Harris, who hired her on the spot. She would start tomorrow.
The hours of Betty's new job were not so nice: seven in the morning to eight at night. Nor was she enthusiastic about the pay, 'At least it's by the piece,' she said. 'Mr Harris says some of the girls make two dollars a day.'
About half past nine, Littlemore went to the stable on Amsterdam Avenue near 100th Street. Over the next two hours, a good dozen hackney drivers came in to drop off or pick up a horse. Littlemore talked with every one of them but drew a blank. When the last stall was empty, the stableboy told Littlemore to wait for one more old-timer who kept his own horse. Sure enough, a little before twelve, an old nag came slow-stepping in, piloted by an ancient driver. At first the old man wouldn't answer the detective, but when Littlemore began flipping a quarter in the air, he found his tongue. He had indeed picked up a black-haired man in front of the Balmoral two nights ago. Did he remember where they went? He did: the Hotel Manhattan.
Littlemore was speechless, but the old driver had more to say. 'Know what he does when we get there? Climbs straight into another cab, one of those red and green gasoline jobs, right in front of my face. Taking money from my pocket, that's what I calls it, and putting it in somebody else's.'
Freud cut our conversation short, abruptly declaring that he had to return to the hotel at once. I understood what was happening. Luckily, a carriage was right at hand.
The instant Freud and I set foot in the hotel, Jung accosted us. He must have been waiting for Freud to return. With inexplicable ardor, he planted himself right in front of Freud, blocking our way, insisting on speaking with him without delay. The moment was the least propitious possible. Freud had just informed me, with evident embarrassment, how pressing was his need.
'Great heavens, Jung,' said Freud, 'let me through. I have to get to my room.'
'Why? Are you having the - the problem again?'
'Lower your voice,' Freud said. 'Yes. Now let me pass. It is urgent.'
'I knew it. Your enuresis,' said Jung, using the medical term for involuntary micturition, 'is psychogenic.'
'Jung, it is -'
'It is a neurosis. I can help you!'
'It is -' Freud stopped in mid-sentence. His voice changed altogether. He spoke evenly and very quietly, looking straight at Jung. 'It is now too late.'
An extremely awkward pause ensued. Then Freud went on. 'Do not look down, either of you. Jung, you will turn around and walk just in front of me. Younger, you will be on my left. No, on my left. Walk directly to the elevator. Go.'
Thus arranged, we made a stiff procession to the elevators. One of the clerks stared at us; it was irritating, but I don't think he suspected. To my astonishment, Jung would not stop talking. 'Your Count Thun dream - it is the key to everything. Will you let me analyze it?'
'I am hardly in a position to refuse' was Freud's reply.
Freud's dream of Count Thun, the former Austrian prime minister, was known to everyone who had read his work. Reaching the elevator bank, I tried to leave them. To my surprise, Jung stopped me. He said he needed me. We let one car go; the next we had to ourselves.
Inside the elevator, Jung went on. 'Count Thun represented me. Thun: Jung - it could not be clearer. Both names have four letters. Both share the un, whose meaning is obvious. His family was originally German but obliged to emigrate; so was mine. He is of higher birth than you; so am I. He is the picture of arrogance; I am accused of arrogance. In your dream, he is your enemy but also a member of your inner circle; someone you lead, but someone who threatens you - and an Aryan, decidedly an Aryan. The conclusion is inescapable: you were dreaming of me, but you had to distort
it, because you did not want to acknowledge that you regard me as a threat.'
'Carl,' said Freud slowly, 'I dreamt of Count Thun in 1898. That was more than a decade ago. You and I did not meet until 1907.'
The doors opened. The corridor was empty. Freud walked briskly out; we followed. I could not imagine what Jung was thinking or what his response would be. It was this: 'I know it! We dream what is to come as well as what has passed. Younger,' he exclaimed, his eyes unnaturally bright, 'you can confirm it!'
'I?'
'Yes, of course you. You were there. You saw the whole thing.' Suddenly Jung seemed to change his mind and addressed Freud again. 'Never mind. Your enuresis signifies ambition. It is a means of drawing attention to yourself - as you did just now, in the lobby. It appears whenever you feel you have an enemy, an opposite number, an un you must overcome. I am now that un. Hence your problem has reappeared.'
We reached Freud's room. He fished in his pocket for the key - a task uncomfortable for him at present. In the end, the key dropped to the floor. No one moved. Then Freud picked it up. When upright again, he said to Jung, 'I doubt very much I enjoy Joseph's gift of prophecy, but
I can tell you this: you are my heir. You will inherit psychoanalysis when I die, and you will become its leader even before that. I will see to it. I am seeing to it. I have said all this to you before. I have told the others; I say it now again. There is no one else, Carl. Do not doubt it.'
'Then tell me the rest of your Count Thun dream!' cried Jung. 'You have always said there was a part of that dream you did not reveal. If I am your heir, tell me. It will confirm my analysis; I am certain of it. What was it?'
Freud shook his head. I think he was smiling - ruefully, perhaps. 'My boy,' he said to Jung, 'there are some things even I cannot divulge. I should never have any authority again. Now leave me, both of you. I will join you in the dining room in half an hour.'
Jung turned without a word and strode away.
The Manhattan Bridge, nearing completion in the summer of 1909, was the last of the three great suspension bridges built across the East River to connect the island of Manhattan with what had been, until 1898, the City of Brooklyn. These bridges - the Brooklyn, the Williamsburg, the Manhattan - were, when constructed, the longest single spans in existence, extolled by Scientific American as the greatest engineering feats the world had ever known. Together with the invention of spun-steel cable, one particular technological innovation made them possible: the ingenious conceit of the pneumatic caisson.
The problem to which the caisson responded was this. The massive support towers for these bridges, necessary to hold up their suspension cables, had to rest on foundations built underwater, almost a hundred feet beneath the surface. These foundations could not be laid directly on the soft riverbed. Instead, layer upon layer of sand, silt, shale, clay, and boulder had to be dredged, broken, and sometimes dynamited until one reached bedrock. To perform such excavation underwater was universally regarded as impossible - until the idea of the pneumatic caisson was hit upon.
The caisson was basically an enormous wooden box. The Manhattan Bridge caisson, on the New York City side, had an area of seventeen thousand square feet. Its walls were made from countless planks of yellow pine lumber, bolted together to a thickness of over twenty feet and caulked with a million barrels of oakum, hot pitch, and varnish. The lower three feet of the caisson were reinforced with boiler plate, inside and out. The weight of the whole: over sixty million pounds.
A caisson had a ceiling but no man-made floor. Its floor was the riverbed itself. In essence, the pneumatic caisson was the largest diving bell ever built.
In 1907, the Manhattan Bridge caisson was sunk to the river bottom, water filling its internal compartments. On land, enormous steam engines were fired up, which, running day and night, pumped air through iron pipes down into the great box. The forced air, building up to enormous pressure, drove out all the water through boreholes drilled in the caisson's walls. An elevator shaft connected the caisson to a pier. Men would take this elevator down into the caisson, where they could breathe the pumped, compressed air.
There they had direct access to the riverbed and hence were able to perform the underwater construction work previously considered impossible: hammering the rock, shoveling the mud, dynamiting the boulders, laying the concrete. Debris was discharged through ingeniously devised compartments called windows, although one could not see through them. Three hundred men could work in the caisson at one time.
An invisible danger lay in wait for them there. The men who emerged from a day's work in the very first pneumatic caisson - employed for the Brooklyn Bridge - frequently began to feel a strange light-headedness. This was followed by a stiffening of their joints, then by a paralysis of the elbows and knees, then by an unendurable pain throughout the entire body. Doctors called the mysterious condition caisson disease. Workmen called it 'the bends,' because of the contorted posture into which its sufferers were driven. Thousands of workers had their health ruined by it, hundreds endured paralysis, and many died before it was discovered that slowing the climb back to the surface - forcing the men to spend time at intermediate stages as they ascended the shaft - prevented the disorder.
By 1909, the science of decompression had advanced impressively. Tables had been drawn up prescribing exactly how long a man needed to decompress, which depended on how much time he had spent down in the caisson. From these tables, the man preparing to enter the caisson just after midnight on August 31, 1909, knew he could spend fifteen minutes down below without requiring any decompression at all. He had no fear of the underwater descent.
He had made the trip many times. This trip, however, would be different in one respect. He would be alone.
He had driven one of his automobiles almost down to the river itself, navigating around machinery, lumber, tilting corrugated-tin shacks, fifty-foot rounds of steel cable, and piles of broken stone. The construction site was deserted, the night watchman had completed his final rounds, and the first crews of workmen would not arrive until dawn. The tower of the bridge, virtually finished, cast a shadow over his car in the moonlight, making him all but invisible from the street. The steam engines were still roaring, pumping air down to the caisson a hundred feet below and masking all other sound.
From the back of his car, he removed a large black trunk, which he carried onto the pier to the mouth of the caisson shaft. Another man would not have been able to manage the feat, but this man was strong, tall, and athletic. He knew how to hoist a heavy trunk over his back. It made an incongruous sight, since the man was wearing black tie and tails.
He unlocked the elevator and entered it, dragging the trunk in with him. Two jets of blue flame provided light. As the elevator made its journey downward, the roar of the steam engines became a distant throbbing. The darkness became cooler. There was a deep, dank smell of earth and salt. The man felt the pressure building in his inner ear. He negotiated the air lock without difficulty, opened the caisson hatch, forced the trunk down a ramp - it echoed monstrously as it fell - and descended to the wooden planks below.
Blue-flame gaslights also illuminated the caisson. They burned pure oxygen, providing enough light to work by while emitting neither smoke nor odor. In their unsteady glow, catlike shadows shifted on the ground and in the rafters. The man looked at his watch, went directly to one of the so-called windows, opened its inner hatch, and with a grunt pushed the trunk inside it. Resealing the window, he operated two pull chains hanging from the wall. The first opened the window's outer hatch. The second caused the window's compartment to rotate, dumping its contents - in this case, one heavy black trunk - into the river. With a different set of chains, he closed the outer hatch and activated an air pipe that flushed the river water from the compartment, making the window ready for the next user.
He was done. He looked at his watch: only five minutes had elapsed since he entered the caisson. Then he heard a piece of wood creaking.
Among th
e various sounds one can hear indoors in the nighttime, some are instantly recognizable. There is, for example, the unmistakable pattering of a small animal. There is the banging of a door in the wind. Then there is the sound of an adult human being shifting his weight or taking a step on a wooden floor: this was the sound the man had just heard.
He spun around and called out, 'Who's there?'
'It's only me, sir,' answered a voice, sounding falsely distant in the compressed air.
'Who is me?' said the man in black tie and tails.
'Malley, sir.' Out from the shadows where two joists intersected stepped a redheaded man, short but with the girth of a bear, muddy, unkempt, and smiling.
'Seamus Malley?'
'The one and only,' answered Malley. 'You won't fire me, will you, sir?'
'What the devil are you doing down here?' replied the taller man. 'Who else is with you?'
'Not a soul. It's just they have me working twelve hours of a Tuesday, sir, and then the morning shift on Wednesday.'
'You're spending the night here?'
'What's the point of going up at all, I ask, when by the time you're up it's only time to come down again?' Malley was a favorite among the workmen, known for his fine tenor, which he liked to exercise in the echoing chambers of the caisson, and his seemingly unlimited capacity to consume alcoholic potables of any kind. The latter talent had caused him trouble around the Malley household the day before yesterday, which, being a Sunday, was a time when no alcohol ought to have been consumed at all. His incensed wife told him not to show his face until he could show it sober the next Sunday. It was this injunction that, in truth, had obliged Malley to make his bed in the caisson. 'So I say to myself, Malley, just kip down here for the night, why don't you, and none the worse or the wiser.'
The Interpretation Of Murder Page 13