Robert Bloch's Psycho

by Chet Williamson

  Norman closed his eyes and breathed in the fresher air from the hallway until he felt better. Then he went back to his bed and turned over his pillow so the dry side was facing up. He lay down and tried not to think about the dream. Because, after all, that’s what it was. Only a dream.

  Just before he drifted back to sleep, he wondered vaguely why, if it was just a dream, he could still smell, very faintly, that odor of corruption.

  * * *

  Marie Radcliffe was at the nurses’ station of Ward D when Dick O’Brien came running down the hall toward her, followed by three other attendants. “Marie!” he yelled. “Go get Dr. Goldberg! Me and Ben caught a guy trying to break in down in the cellar.”

  “Is Ben okay?” she asked as the men ran by.

  “He’s fine, yeah,” Dick called over his shoulder. “Get the doc, okay?”

  Marie dashed down the corridor, turning toward the row of offices. Dr. Goldberg’s door was closed, and she knocked loudly, but there was no answer. It was after midnight, and he might have gone home, but most of the time when he worked late, he slept on the daybed in his office. She knocked again, even more forcefully, but there was no response.

  Marie turned the door handle and found it was unlocked. She pushed it open and called, “Dr. Goldberg?” There was no answer, so she entered the office.

  The desk lamp was on, but Goldberg wasn’t seated at his desk, nor was he lying on the daybed. The room seemed to be empty. The papers on the desk were stacked neatly, and the chair was pushed up flush to the desk. Had Dr. Goldberg changed his mind and left early? If he had, he would have had to walk past the nurses’ station at which Marie had been sitting most of the evening.

  She walked over to the door to the doctor’s private bathroom and knocked lightly. Hearing no answer, she opened the door and turned on the light. The room was empty, the shower stall dry.

  Then Marie went over to the record player. A red light at the bottom of the console indicated that the power was still on. She opened the lid and looked down at the turntable. A black-and-white angel sitting on a record looked up at her from an otherwise red label. She leaned farther over and read, WAGNER “DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG” ACT II (PART 2), and saw the number 5 at both the nine and three o’clock positions on the label.

  Side 5? But Dr. Goldberg had said there were ten sides and he had intended to listen to them all. If he had changed his mind, why hadn’t he put the record away, since he was so meticulous about caring for his “children,” and turned off the machine?

  Maybe he’d gone to the break room to get some food or coffee from the machines, though that seemed unlikely. Whatever the answers, Dr. Goldberg wasn’t in his office.

  Marie was crossing to the door to search for him elsewhere when her peripheral vision caught a glimpse of something glinting on the floor, a small object on the carpet just beneath the desk. She knelt, and when she saw what it was, a little shock passed through her. It was the polished piece of petrified wood that she had given as a good luck charm to Norman Bates.

  She picked it up and looked at it more closely. There was no mistaking something she had carried in her pockets and her purse for years. But how did it get here? Marie knew that Dr. Goldberg had recently talked to Norman, but that had been in Norman’s room, not Goldberg’s office. Perhaps she would ask Norman about it, then thought that it might be wiser to talk to Dr. Reed about it first.

  She dropped it into the pocket of her uniform and went to look for Dr. Goldberg.

  * * *

  Even with the strong wind blowing the fresh rain through the air so that it drenched his face and clothing, the man still thought the swamp smelled rank and corrupt, like a cemetery in a nightmare, with open graves and coffins whose lids had rotted away, exposing their residents to the elements. It was a fitting simile, he thought, since a graveyard was precisely what it had been and was again.

  True, he was using it as a graveyard for automobiles, but Norman Bates had been faithful to the original meaning of graveyard. He had sunk Mary Crane in it, along with her car, not all that long ago. And now the man was only following in Norman’s footsteps.

  Collar up against the wind and rain, he watched as the Lincoln slipped slowly into the muck. In the darkness, its peach color had turned black against the dark of the swamp. Odd that Goldberg had chosen such a color, he thought, almost feminine. Perhaps the psychiatrist might have benefited from some treatment himself.

  Be that as it may, the car was sinking more quickly than Myron Gunn’s. He had chosen a different place, a dozen yards or so to the right of where he had sunk the previous one. It wouldn’t do to have Goldberg’s Lincoln slip into the muck, hit the other one, then stop dead. He could imagine the sign such an occurrence would cause:

  To ensure a tidy swamp,

  please dump all victims’ cars next to rather than behind each other.

  Thank you.

  The Management

  He chuckled to himself as he watched the car slowly sink. He’d had to be more patient tonight. The black car was there, the one he saw earlier, the one that obviously didn’t belong. And, as before, there had been someone in it. So he’d waited to take Goldberg’s car, waited until the stranger had gotten out of his own car and melted into the stormy night, moving around to the back of the building.

  Once the stranger had gone, the man moved fast, under cover of night and rain, jumped in the car, and drove it away unseen. It was a long shot that people would think Goldberg had followed Myron Gunn and Eleanor Lindstrom’s lead and hit the highway, but it had worked out nicely before, and maybe Goldberg had his own secrets that he wanted to hide. At least it would confuse the police more to have Goldberg disappear rather than have his body found. In this case, his death wasn’t a given.

  Over the sound of the rain, he heard that nauseating, sucking sound that told him the swamp was fully claiming the car. He watched with deep satisfaction as the trunk and finally the tips of the tailfins went under the surface. Thick, viscous bubbles of muck and mire belched their way upward, and then the car was gone.

  He pressed his hat down more tightly on his head and turned away from the swamp, beginning his long, wet walk back to his own car.

  * * *

  An hour later, in one of the patient interview rooms of the state hospital, Captain Banning and Sheriff Jud Chambers sat across a table from the man who had been discovered in the cellar. The man was now handcuffed, and behind him stood two highway patrol officers. A leather wallet lay on the table, with an assortment of cards spread out on the table’s wooden surface.

  “All right, Mr. Dov Bergmann, if that’s your name,” Captain Banning said, “you’ve got some interesting ID here. Seems you’re from Israel, huh?”

  “I’m not answering any questions,” Bergmann said. “I want you to call the nearest Israeli consulate and inform them of my detainment.”

  “Oh, you do, do you? Well, I’ll tell you something, Dov, my friend. You haven’t been detained, you’ve been arrested. And I don’t care where you’re from. You’re not gonna see the backside of any consul or even a lawyer until we get some questions answered here.”

  “I have the right to counsel,” Bergmann said.

  “I told you, Dov,” Banning said, as if explaining to a child, “no consul, no lawyer.”

  “I said counsel. An attorney. Do you not have that right in the United States?”

  “Well, I couldn’t tell the difference, with your accent. And you’re a foreigner, so you got no U.S. rights,” Banning said.

  Jud Chambers leaned toward Banning and whispered, “I’m not sure that’s right.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Banning whispered back. “I’m not having this guy walk out of here on some diplomatic-immunity bullshit.”

  “Well, I don’t think he’s really a diplomat,” Chambers whispered.

  “Just let me handle it…” Banning raised his voice, “Now, look, Dov. You’re in my jurisdiction. You, a foreigner, break into a state institution
with a loaded handgun, which you then fire at people who are authorized to detain you until an official arrest takes place. Which has been done. And I want to know what you were doing here with a gun. You’re not gonna see daylight again until I get answers.”

  Bergmann looked down at the tabletop, his mouth a thin line, and did not reply.

  The silence was broken by the sound of the door opening. Another officer came into the room. He was holding a portfolio made of thin cardboard with an attached elastic band around it. “Found the car his keys fit,” the officer said. “This was under the seat, along with some other weapons and stuff.”

  Banning motioned the officer out, then opened the portfolio and looked at the paper files and photographs inside. Some of the documents were in Hebrew, but others were in English, German, and French. For several minutes, Banning browsed and read what he could, passing the papers to Jud Chambers, who was the first to speak. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly.

  “Holy hell,” Banning breathed in response. He looked up at Bergmann. “Who are you with? That Jewish secret service? The one that got Adolf Eichmann last year down in Argentina?”

  “Mossad,” Jud Chambers said.

  “I prefer to speak to an Israeli consul,” Bergmann said.

  “You broke in here to kill somebody, didn’t you?” Banning said. “What these papers say … you came in here to kill Dr. Goldberg?”

  Dov Bergmann looked at Captain Banning for a long time. “All right, then,” he finally said. “It’s all there in front of you. Maybe … maybe if I tell you nearly everything, it can end here.”

  “Maybe,” Banning said. “But what do you mean, nearly?”

  “I cannot tell you who I work for. That I cannot do.”

  Banning nodded. “We’ll see. Depends on what else you say.”

  “All right, then,” Bergmann repeated. He looked over his shoulder at the two officers behind him, then back at Banning. “I prefer to have as few people as possible hear this. Unless you’re afraid I can overcome you both with handcuffs on.”

  Banning looked at the two men and gestured them out of the room with a jerk of his head. When they were gone, Bergmann continued, “First, I didn’t come in here to kill Isaac Goldberg. I came in here to execute Kurt Gephardt.”

  “The guy in here,” Banning said, holding up the papers.

  Bergmann nodded. “Dr. Isaac Goldberg died in 1944 in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in his own country of Austria. He was worked to death. They called it ‘extermination through labor.’ The following year, when the Third Reich went up in flames, his identity was taken over by Kurt Gephardt, who, to all intents and purposes, became Isaac Goldberg, only, this Isaac Goldberg had survived the camps. This happened frequently, and it was easy to accomplish, as nearly all family members and friends of the dead man whose identity was stolen were dead as well. Gephardt—now Goldberg—traveled to America and continued his … career.”

  “You mean as a psychologist?” Banning said.

  “A psychiatrist,” Bergmann answered. “Gephardt was a psychiatrist as well as Goldberg. With stolen identities, the Nazis tried to make the matches as close as possible.”

  Banning shook his head. “So you’re saying this Gephardt lived all these years as Goldberg? And nobody ever found out?”

  Bergmann nodded. “There was a physical resemblance between them, but it mattered little, since all of Goldberg’s documentation had been destroyed by the Nazis, so there were no photographs, at least none that would readily surface. But as you see”—he nodded at the sheaf of papers Banning was holding—“we found one. Enough for our team to determine that the prewar and postwar Goldbergs were not the same man.”

  “So then this Gephardt,” Banning said, “is a war criminal? I take it he did something pretty bad for you guys to come after him like this.”

  Bergmann took a deep breath. “Have either of you ever heard of Aktion T4?” He gave it the German pronunciation, then said, “Action T4.” Both Banning and Chambers shook their heads. “It has a long history, but I’ll keep it concise. It was a program of forced euthanasia for the Nazis to get rid of undesirables.”

  “Jews?” Jud Chambers asked.

  “There were Jews among the victims.” He smiled bitterly. “There always were, and the Jewish patients were the first to go. But the victims in this case were anyone who didn’t conform to Hitler’s idea of what German genes should contain—people with chronic illnesses, physical disabilities, the mentally ill. Since the best young men of Germany were dying at the front, the weak and sick and insane shouldn’t be left to procreate freely at home. A balance had to be reached. That required Gnadentod—‘merciful death.’”

  “Euthanasia?” Banning said.

  “Yes. From 1939 to 1941, seventy thousand people labeled undesirables were put to death under the program. And do you know where these extermination centers were located? In mental hospitals. So psychiatrists ended up sentencing their own patients to death. Dr. Kurt Gephardt was there from the beginning.”

  Jud Chambers shook his head. “How were they killed? Gas?”

  “Now that,” Dov Bergmann said, “is an interesting story. Children with birth defects were killed by chemical injections, but that wasn’t efficient enough for the vast numbers of adults who were to be killed. So they tried carbon monoxide gas, and it worked so well on these ‘mental defectives’ that deadly gas quickly became the death of choice for the Third Reich. Aktion T4, in short, was the birthplace of the Holocaust. And Kurt Gephardt was one of its godfathers.”

  Banning leaned forward as he spoke. “But you said that it only went until 1941, this Action T4 thing.”

  “The policies established in Aktion T4 continued unofficially until the end of the war. Two hundred thousand more people, many of them children, died. And Kurt Gephardt was there all the time, sending them to their deaths with a brief examination and a signature.”

  Bergmann had gone pale, and he squeezed his eyes shut for a moment before opening them again. “Do you suppose I could have a cigarette?”

  Banning took a Camel from his pack and handed it to Bergmann, who took it with handcuffed hands and put it in his mouth. Banning lit it for him. “So Dr. Goldberg is really Gephardt,” he said.

  “We have undeniable proof.”

  “And you were coming in here to, what, assassinate him?”

  Bergmann inhaled smoke and blew it out. “I think it best not to discuss our plans in that regard.”

  There was silence in the room for a moment, then Jud Chambers whispered, “Goddamn…”

  The word seemed to bring Banning to life. “The first thing we need to do is confront Dr.… whoever he is with this. You’ve made a serious accusation, Mr. Bergmann, one that you were ready to kill him over. He’s got to be allowed to respond to it.”

  “Oh, by all means,” Bergmann said lightly. “Perhaps you should call him on the telephone and inform him…” He paused and his face grew stern, his words icy, “… so that he can escape. Honestly, do you believe that Gephardt is going to just come in here to answer these accusations? He’ll run. As soon as they get a whiff that something isn’t right, they’re gone. Gephardt’s been lucky. We had no idea of the truth until information recently came into our hands. We don’t want to lose him.”

  Banning nodded. “Okay. He’s not in the building now, we know that, but—”

  “What?” Bergmann cried, trying to leap to his feet. “He was here when I broke in—his car was here! Are you saying he left between the time I came in here and now? When all the…” He seemed to be searching for the English word. “… fuss was going on?”

  “Well,” Chambers said, “now I think on it, I might’ve seen his car heading out the road when I was coming in. Big light-colored Lincoln, isn’t it?”

  Dov Bergmann spat out some foreign words that the other two thought might have been curses. “He’s gone!” he said. Then more softly, he added, “Why was I so impatient?” He shook his head and answered his o
wn question. “I suppose I just didn’t want to waste another night. And now … see what I’ve wasted now…”

  Banning and Chambers saw tears in his eyes. Banning turned and barked toward the closed door, “Keene! Harris!” The two troopers came back in. “I want you to go to Dr. Goldberg’s house and see if he and his car are there. If he is, tell him he’s needed out here right away and bring him back—in your car. Don’t let him out of your sight for a second, got it?”

  Keene and Harris nodded and left. “If he’s there, they’ll bring him back,” Banning said.

  “He won’t be there.” Bergmann took a final drag on his cigarette and crushed the butt in the ashtray. “Honestly, I don’t think any of you will ever see your Dr. Goldberg again.”

  14

  When the police arrived at the home of the man known as Dr. Isaac Goldberg, they found neither the man nor his car. After receiving this news, Captain Banning allowed Dov Bergmann to call the nearest Israeli consulate, with the caveat that he should speak only in English.

  After several minutes of conversation, Bergmann told Banning that the consul-general was connecting him with the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, and then, after he further explained the situation, Bergmann looked at Banning again. “They’re getting in touch with the U.S. Department of State. They’ll want to speak to you.”

  Several minutes passed during which, Banning assumed, the embassy was speaking with the State Department. Finally someone came on the line identifying himself as Under Secretary of State Chester Bowles, who told Banning that the State Department would send several agents to bring Dov Bergmann to Washington. He also told Banning that Bergmann was to be isolated, and that absolutely no one was to speak to him further. “The State Department would prefer,” said the officious voice on the phone, “that as few people know of this occurrence as possible. These events must not be made public in any way. May we count on your cooperation in this regard, Captain Banning?”