by Singer, Ron
Robinson marveled at Fedoruk’s sang-froid. “With helpers like the ones Geistmann has,” he said slowly, “it’s no wonder we can’t catch him.” He let that sit for a moment.
"Look, John. Your friend Yazzie is very sharp-eyed. I know that’s a stereotype about Native-Americans, but it’s true of him.” Fedoruk paused for a moment. “Why do you think I hit Hosteen Yazzie, John?” Robinson did not answer. “I hated to do it, but, remember, I was assigned to be your minder.” He spoke matter-of-factly. “I did it to keep Geistmann from killing you both. Whoever followed him over to the slag heap that night would have wound up inside, with Mr. Billings.”
“Oh?” Robinson had not thought of that. Did you go after Geistmann yourself, then? After you disabled Hank?”
“Are you crazy! Without backup?”
“Why didn’t you just ask Hank to go after him with you?”
Fedoruk’s laugh sounded bitter. “You don’t trust me, anymore, do you, John? That was a very short friendship.”
“Why didn’t you and Hank go after him together?”
“My job was to protect both of you, you self-righteous fool!” Fedoruk was shouting now. “Scott’s boys and the marshals were the ones who were supposed to catch Geistmann. That was the plan. You can ask Arnold, yourself. Go ahead, John, ask Arnold.”
Although Robinson felt reluctant to switch right back to belief in Fedoruk, the excuse made some sense. Yes, in Fedoruk’s position –assuming he knew how to stalk someone and knock him out—he might have done the same thing –might have.
“Okay,” he said. “Suppose we continue this conversation face to face. Where are you staying?”
“In the barracks at the Quantico Marine Corps Base.” Fedoruk’s anger had subsided. “We’re all here. It’s like a very big jail, but the food isn’t bad, and the seclusion is convenient for our non-stop meetings, which begin at eight o’clock every morning. I’ll fill you in when I see you. It will be better to meet at your place, assuming your room isn’t bugged. But that doesn’t matter, we can turn on the radio.”
“Good. Arnold has me staying at a Bed and Breakfast in Georgetown. When are you free?”
“Now, until tomorrow at eight a.m.”
The appointment was made for later that evening. Robinson gave Fedoruk, who was now car-less, directions via buses and the Metro.
“I’ll leave two hours ago,” he said, sounding as if he were trying to create a thaw with the little joke.
They hung up, and, taking a few deep breaths, Robinson filed his unfinished business with Fedoruk. He then replied to an exciting email that had arrived while he was on the phone. It was from Pablo Markowitz, the forensic psychologist, and it was an answer to the email Robinson had sent the previous night initiating the communication and asking if they could share ideas.
Ah, yes, The Librarian. I’ve heard about you. Pleased to (virtually) meet you. How can I help? PM
And now Robinson typed:
I read in the Geistmann dossier that you called him a cerebral narcissist. I’ve come across that term in the literature, but I’d like to know more. I was also surprised by what looks to me (again, from the dossier) like a combination of psychopathy with a touch of O-C-D. Is that possible? If you want to be specific, perhaps we should talk. You can ask AW for the number of my cell –and please use yours. Thanks, JR.
The detailed and fascinating answer arrived within five minutes, confirming his suspicion about the underemployment of the shrinkocracy. Markowitz must also possess excellent keyboarding skills No, this had to be a cut-and-paste job. Robinson read the message quickly, memorized the gist of it, and noted that the psychologist had ignored his cell phone idea. Next, the thought flashed through his mind that he should also contact Mauro Baltazar, to see if he would volunteer any of the forensic details that had so obviously been lost or not shared with him. But now it was time to go to dinner, so he filed this idea, too.
He brushed his teeth, got dressed, grabbed his wallet, keys, and umbrella, and trotted around the building to the rear entrance, the one used by his hosts. He rang the bell, and when the door opened, handed his laptop, the dossier, and Weatherbee’s list to the man of the family. No words were exchanged, only a nod and a smile.
The charming old three-story yellow brick building was on Prospect Street, a narrow, two-way local thoroughfare with a mixture of old brick and clapboard houses in various states of repair and renovation. Robinson was lodged half-a-block from the Georgetown University campus, between 36th and 37th Streets.
To a stranger, at least, Georgetown was a comforting neighborhood, full of beautiful trees and clever, rich-and-wholesome looking young women. There were some old maples, and even the odd survivor –a Jefferson elm, if that were possible. The only one in town, supposedly, stood next to the White House, a replacement for another one that had fallen in a storm. Of course, there were no original Jefferson elms in Washington, or anywhere else, for that matter, only clones, or, properly speaking, cultivars.
Because he wanted exercise after his long day’s work, he walked down the hill on Prospect, past the Business School, an odd, low-slung, renovated brick complex with ramparts and picnic tables. As he strode along under his umbrella, Robinson passed, or was passed by, numerous joggers and runners, splashing through the puddles or hopping over or around them. Several of these runners could have been serious marathoners. One man who flashed by was notably fit and had just about the same build as the figure in the Rotunda video. He even wore an elegant gray jogging suit and, not a balaclava, but a baseball cap with a black and gold logo. As a very wary John Robinson caught up with the man, who bent to tie a shoe, he saw that the logo was for the Pittsburgh Steelers, not the Peabody Coal Company. Still, the specter of this look-alike gave Robinson a jolt.
Passing a cluster of eateries, he turned right on Wisconsin, walked on for three more blocks, and there it was, the restaurant he was looking for, a plain, inviting little Italian place. His reservation, made that afternoon via a phone number on their website, was for eight, and he arrived three minutes early. He was glad he had called, since the small room he saw through the partly steamed windows was packed. He went in and ordered pasta with a bottle of the house red, intending to carry most of it back to his room for Fedoruk.
While he waited, he had nothing to play with, and he realized he was becoming a bit of a fossil, technologically speaking: neither BlackBerry nor I-Pod, only one cell phone, and not even a “smart” one. But his mind to him a kingdom was. As he waited for the food to arrive, he sipped the wine and accessed Pablo Markowitz’s long email from his photographic memory. As he revisited the email, he interpolated a few editorial comments.
John: Your questions and hunches are spot on. Subject is a complex mixture of two, perhaps even three, of what we call personality disorders. These are the non-psychotic syndromes: no delusions, etc.
Psychopathy. Probable (but see below: cerebral narcissism). Subject exhibits impulsivity, thrill seeking, lack of remorse, many of the classic symptoms. [Indeed.} Three-quarters of all psychopaths are men. The condition is often seeded by severe abuse, often focused on a specific traumatic incident, sometimes in early childhood. I assume you also know there is some recent evidence for hereditary transmission. [News to me, but hardly counterintuitive.] Here’s a wild guess: Gsietmann was an actor who, during a major trauma, disappeared into a trickster-type role, a role he found so congenial that he never emerged from it. Of course, the psychopathy would already have been simmering long before the triggering episode. Sexually, he may have a girlfriend, but could also be celibate, or he may prefer masturbation to the other options. Alternately, he may be gay or latent. [That narrows it down!] In my opinion, unlike many psychopaths, Subject does not physically abuse his sexual partner(s). Instead, he may sublimate his sexual aggression into a sort of chivalric omnipotence, the “I am your savior” kind of thing. But he surely knows how to bring other, non-physical kinds of grief to his partner(s). [e.g. his risk-taking must have dri
ven methodical Peter mad.] Intelligent partners of psychopaths understand they must navigate with extreme caution, operating in cycles in which they alternately enable the psychopath by allowing him to sail before the wind, then reining him in before they are both shipwrecked. [Mixed metaphor.] If we somehow manage to catch Subject alive, we’ll administer the tests, of course: the MMPI, the Eysinck, the SCID-ll, and maybe even a tMRI (if his prison has one). With the tMRI, we’d potentially have the pleasure of knowing that we guessed right: there will be pronounced abnormalities in the paralimbic system.
Putting all of this aside, if you asked the man on the street, he’d have the general idea: G. is a psychopath. Which reminds me, if you happen to run into him, bear in mind that, whatever he says, AT LEAST PART OF HIM WILL WANT TO MAIM OR KILL YOU.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder [Ah ha!]. Subject’s punning, ethical preoccupations and ritualistic tableaux all suggest that, surprisingly, he suffers from a measure, at least, of O-CD. It is very unusual to find this, an anxiety disorder, in either psychopaths or malignant narcissists, both of whom are typically anxiety-deficient, or even anxiety-free. Of course, psychopaths are often ritualistic, but their ritualism is different from obsessive-compulsive ritualism. [Hmm.] Geistmann’s combination of disorders could be extremely useful to his pursuers. Even a small admixture of O-CD with the dominant modes, psychopathy and malignant narcissism, would make him so odd that, more than once along his life’s path, he would have been marked and remembered as odd. [That is useful.]
Malignant Narcissism: Here the diagnosis becomes even more interesting. Subject is very unlike your typical psychopath, who, to put it in layman’s terms, is a destructive and self-destructive fuck-up, a con man, often alcoholic, a thief, check-kiter, etc. --in short very disorganized. In my opinion, Subject’s behavior more closely fits the syndrome of “malignant narcissism,” a term coined by Otto Kernberg, who was in the line leading from Freud through Melanie Klein. You may have read some of what follows. [Half a Wikipedia entry.]
Narcissism seems a constant in psychopathy. Subject exhibits the element of MN behavior that we call “ego-syntonic aggression” –i.e., aggression acceptable to the self without guilt or anxiety, i.e. hatred, but hatred as a defense against narcissistic injury, against a source memory of early humiliation. [Here comes the really good stuff!] The hatred becomes a defense of one’s moral pride, a wellspring of self-righteousness. This theory explains Subject’s demonization of certain types and worship of others –to him, everyone is a fool/villain or a hero. Believe it or not, this dualism hearkens back to when the baby splits the other, in his little world –mother, breast—into good and bad, to handle its new and cosmic sense of frustration. [A Mommie-chean.] Was Subject’s mother particularly frustrating? Who can say? But I bet he had a father who wanted to “make a man” of him, from the moment he poked his cute little head out of the womb. [Heh heh.]
There is a lot of literature, some of it even religious, on the genealogy of hatred. Certain analysts take it back to Freud’s death instinct (popularly known as “the death wish”), the primal rage –although by now that idea has become malodorous to most members of the shrinkocracy, including yours truly. [Good for you: a silly, melodramatic idea.] Regardless, out of the frustrations of the nursing baby comes oral envy, the good breast/mother vs. the bad --i.e., unavailable. I should add that Kernberg disagrees a bit here, following a different, less famous theory, which places the origin of the behavior slightly later. [Does it matter?] In any case, in your MN, as opposed to all the normally frustrated babies who grow up into “normal” adults, the pathology blooms during the oedipal phase. By adulthood, the envy of the hater has established a gallery of differentiated targets. Kernberg (1991) defined hatred as a complex aggressive affect whose primary aim is to destroy its object, a person who is both needed and desired, and the destruction of whom is equally needed and desired. Who and what does Subject both need, and need to destroy? [Yes!!! The powerful and the eminent, the kind of person he himself once aspired to be, the breast snatched away by the ENA rejection.]
Other qualities of the MN: aloofness; the shift of hatred from affect to willed behavior; “never say you’re sorry,” and never feel sorry; no signs of rage in daily life; humiliation of the other; aversion to developed relationships, and extremely narrow emotional range; richly destructive fantasies; and a conscious ideology of self-affirmation amounting to feelings of omniscience and omnipotence. [Check, and double check.]
Do you know the difference between a cerebral, and a somatic, narcissist? [I can guess.] Subject is primarily the former. In other words, he lives to be smarter than everyone else. Is he? Well, yes, than most of us. [Except you and me, of course.] There is a remarkably stable cognitive aspect in most MN’s, and in Subject’s case, this is particularly well developed. The suicidal tendency of many MN’s, the wish to leave a world they realize they can’t ultimately control, possibly takes an interesting twist in Subject, something I don’t find anywhere in the literature: suicidal risk-taking. [A stretch?] Interesting, too, is the apparently total absence in Subject of another attribute frequently associated with MN: self-pity. And, finally, extreme pleasure: yes, our man’s pranks and crimes are a milk-laden tit to him. [A palpable tit-hit!]
That’s the gist of it. Can the MN’s of this world be cured? Some have been known to undergo successful psychotherapy, but not when the pathology is this severe. If Subject is ever apprehended, assuming I’m called upon to testify, I’ll advise them to throw away the key. [Not a whole lot of compassion there...]
BTW, in the interest of academic integrity [here, here!], this summary cries out for a footnote: -- PAUL. C. VITZ,? New York University?, and PHILIP MANGO?, St. Michael's Institute for the Psychological Sciences. “KLEINIAN PSYCHODYNAMICS AND RELIGIOUS ASPECTS OF HATRED AS A DEFENSE MECHANISM,” first printed in Journal of Psychology and Theology.? Copyright 1997 by Rosemead School of Psychology, Biola University, 0091-6471/410-730 1997, Vol. 25, No. 1,64-71, [“Vitz and Mango? Rosemead and Biola?” You can’t make this stuff up.]
You might want to read that seminal article for yourself, John, but I’ve given you a pretty circumstantial summary. I know Phil and Paul, they’re both excellent analysts. AND, FINALLY: You owe me a good dinner for this, my friend. Seriously, I do hope some of my stuff is useful, and that we do meet sometime. Of course, I’ve already told most of it to AW, more than once, who, btw, says you’re the smartest guy he’s met in years. (He’s known me for three.)
Cheers, PM
“Cheers,” indeed!
Episode Fourteen
Episode Fourteen,
Sunday, April 6, 2008. Washington, D.C.
The restaurant lived up to the reviewers’ raves. While he was eating, Robinson double-checked Markowitz’s observations against his own. A point of particular interest was the unlikely O-CD trace. Yes, a cerebral, yes, male. Abused as a child? Hmm. An actor? Not necessarily. Disappeared into a role? That was one way to look at it. Did C.N.’s sometimes displace their recessive S.N. onto non-sexual violence? NB: ask PM about this. Enabler? Peter. Is Peter gay? Possibly. Did Peter try to steer Geistmann away from crimes that would have risked blowback from people or groups that, unlike Interpol, they could not control? Exceptions: Dunduceni and Toularelle. But those were the first murder and the personally motivated one.
When he had finished eating and paid the bill, Robinson was glad of the longish walk back through the chilly rain. As he headed toward his lodging, again beneath the umbrella, he considered the nature theme of Geistmann’s American odyssey. Had he been a whale watcher, or something? Crewed on a transatlantic yacht?
When he reached the building, he unlocked the outer door and stopped in the vestibule. Removing his wet shoes, he bent down to put them on the pale green plush mat in front of the inner door. He hoped Fedoruk would also remove his shoes, both to keep the wood floor of the room clean and dry, and, possibly, to create in the sly Ukrainian a feeling of vulnerability that, together with the
wine, might tease out some truths.
Then, he noticed a wet footprint on the mat in front of the door, which made his heart jump and the blood rush to his face. His instinct was to creep back out of the building in his socks, and, as he sprinted down the block, to use his cell to call Weatherbee and/or the local police. He paused for a moment, stupidly considering where to put the wine down. Inside the room, someone cleared his throat.
“Don’ be scare-et, Chahn, is only me, Fedoorik.” In a single gulp, Robinson sucked in as much air as he could, tried the doorknob, which he found unlocked, and crept in, intending, if necessary, to use the bottle as a bludgeon. But, as he crossed the threshold, Fedoruk spoke again.
“I’m sorry I startled you, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to wait in the street.” The lamp next to the armchair was turned on, and in its halo sat the Ukrainian, completely dry, and wearing the same outfit he had worn at the conference in Charlottesville five days before. Smiling, he gestured to the bathroom. “I poot my shoe and umbralla in there, in the toob. I chope o-gay?” Then, Robinson heard a loud knocking from somewhere in the shadows of the room, which once again made his heart jump, and made him squeeze the neck of the bottle. But it was only the radiator. The landlord was thoughtfully taking the chill off the evening.