Judge Peoples swore in the jury and announced that the trial would start on the day after the Thanksgiving weekend. He said that he had decided not to sequester the jury because of the season, and filled the air with blue smoke and rockets about not paying attention to media coverage of the trial and not discussing the proceedings with anyone outside the courtroom. Then he sent everyone home for the long, somnolent weekend.
Karp went back to his office and was delighted to find no one waiting for him and only two message slips, one from Dr. Emanuel Perlsteiner and one from V.T. Newbury. The staff of the Homicide Bureau had at last got the message and were now bothering Roland Hrcany. Karp hoped they were all enjoying it. He pocketed the one from V.T. And returned Perlsteiner’s call, which led him to ring up his police driver and have himself driven to Bellevue Hospital.
There, in one of the oldest and shabbiest corridors of Bellevue’s psychiatric hospital, he found Dr. Perlsteiner, in a tiny office hardly larger than a janitor’s closet. This office resembled one of those apartments that the police have to break into after the neighbors complain of the smell. It held a metal desk, a desk chair, and a straight-backed visitor’s chair. Its residual volume, save for narrow paths necessary to reach the two chairs, was almost entirely consumed by books and papers, stacked in teetering piles that reached nearly to the ceiling. Barely visible among this wrack was the proprietor.
Karp entered and stood by the desk. The visitor’s chair was covered with files and journals.
“Dr. Perlsteiner?”
Perlsteiner smiled up at him. He was a seventy-four-year-old man who looked ninety. His head was a hairless dome covered with tight skin the color of faded burlap, adorned with large liver spots and (as almost always, and now) on the broad forehead a pair of heavy, thick tortoise-shell eyeglasses. His teeth as he smiled were startlingly false. His eyes were bright and dark, shining out from deep, ash-colored pouches on either side of a little falcon nose. This head sat precariously on a short, thin, wattled neck. The general impression was of an extremely ancient sparrow.
“Yes, how are you?” said Perlsteiner. “Sit, sit, move that trash away, please.”
Karp cleared the chair and sat. Perlsteiner cocked his head and looked at his visitor, emphasizing the sparrow effect. “So,” he said, “your name is, please?” His English was only slightly accented.
“Um, I’m Roger Karp, Dr. Perlsteiner. You called me, remember?”
Wrinkled brow, followed by delighted discovery. “Karp, yes! And how are you feeling today, Mr. Karp?”
Karp was at the moment not feeling well at all. The old guy’s lost it, he thought. I sent a senile shrink to examine Jonathan Rohbling. He thinks I’m some patient. But he said, carefully, “I’m fine, Doctor. This isn’t about me. I’m here about your examination of Jonathan Rohbling.”
Dr. Perlsteiner’s eyes narrowed. He slipped his glasses down into position, magnifying those eyes, which, Karp now saw, were far from gaga, were alert, even piercing. He said, “Yes, I know that, Mr. Karp. I asked out of courtesy, and because I detect you are ill at ease. I wondered why that is.”
Karp felt sweat start beneath his arms and on his upper lip. It was true that he had felt somewhat odd since the sexual extravaganza of the previous night. Karp was not a prude in the sense that he took any minatory interest in the sexual behavior of others (except, professionally, when it included murder as a delight), but he had a strict sense of what was proper for him, a meat-and-two-vegetables sensuality, that is, and the funny business with Marlene had touched areas in his psyche that he wished had not been touched at all, that he did not wish even to think about. And he was at that moment subject to an absurd fear that it showed, was obvious to the searching eye of this shrink, who, in truth, was the canniest whom Karp had ever encountered. It also briefly crossed his mind that the doc had picked up on the now embarrassing thought he had entertained that Perlsteiner might be ready for the soft-brain ward, which clearly he was not, far from it. So Karp sat and blushed.
Perlsteiner, for his part, knew what guilt looked like from fifty years of practice and knew also that, Karp not being a patient, the thing to do was to drop his gaze and clean his glasses, which he did, and then he unerringly yanked his notes on Rohbling out from a stack of identical-seeming files. He paged through them briefly and then spoke, looking down at the pages of spidery writing.
“Yes, Rohbling. What have we here? No gross neurological defect. No systematic delusions. No paranoid ideation. Hm, hm. Actually, you know, an interesting case.”
“Is he insane?”
Perlsteiner looked up sharply at the word, and slid his glasses back onto his forehead. “Well, as you should know very well by now, Mr. Karp, this is not a judgment I like to make.”
“Yeah, right, Doc, it’s a legal term. But in your opinion, I mean, give me a sense of what you can testify to with respect to the defendant’s state of mind when he committed the crimes he’s charged with.”
Perlsteiner seemed to ignore this question. “Yes, an interesting case. Almost, one would say, the sort of case we might have seen in Vienna in the twenties. I review. This young man is raised, the only son, in a secure bourgeois family. The father is an engineer, very vigorous, very correct, quite wealthy. The mother is neurotic, naturally, by turns smothering and bored. She wishes little Jon to be a good boy, but, it seems, boys are not always good, and so she leaves much of his upbringing to Clarice, the servant. Who is a colored woman, of course.”
“He told you all this?”
Perlsteiner smiled. “Oh, yes. He was the kind you wish they would shut up for one moment. But you know, it was all material. You understand, it is cheap-psychically, I mean-to utter material. It is not at all the same as working with the deeper feelings. He shows the signs of having spent much time with mediocre psychiatrists. Well trained to spout. Shall I continue? It is very interesting, I assure you.”
“Please,” said Karp.
“All right, so we find at an early age the boy begins to show signs of oddness. He will not play with other children, for example. He is slow to walk and speak. Perhaps retarded? No, they test him; he is normal, perhaps a bit above. But the behavior! Most significantly, he has, by the age of four, one habit that disturbs the parents: he rubs his face and hands with pigmented material, of preference brown or black in color. He uses for this paints, chocolate, ashes, earth, mud, whatever he can. Of course, the parents are concerned. They take him again to a specialist, this time a-you must pardon the expression-a child psychiatrist, who assures them that this is normal behavior to the anal period.”
“Is it?”
Perlsteiner gave him a look both sharp and pitying. “It is not, and there is no such thing as an anal period. To resume, they wait, but it does not stop. They cannot take him anywhere for fear he will make an embarrassment. At last the poppa loses patience. He tells Clarice, who is, of course, in complete charge of disciplining the child, no more with the paint and mud! He must be scrubbed when he does it with the floor brush and the laundry soap on the face. So he is, and so the behavior stops, or at least it no longer appears where it can annoy the poppa. Now, at our remove, we can see what has happened. The father is a stranger, prone to violence; the mother is ‘nervous’ and cannot bear the ordinary conflicts of child rearing. All the love and discipline the child knows comes from the servant. Yet when the child looks at himself, he sees he is not like the maid in appearance: he is pale, she is dark. So he wishes to correct this and does.”