'There he is,' said the detective, pointing. 'That's him.'
It would have been hard to miss Chong Sing: a lone, conspicuous Chinese among a throng of white and black workingmen. He was wheeling a barrow filled with cinder blocks.
'Walk right at him,' Littlemore instructed the officer. 'If he runs, I'll take him.'
Chong Sing didn't run. At the sight of a police officer, he merely put his head down and kept pushing his wheelbarrow. When the officer put the arm on him, Chong submitted without a fight. Other workmen stopped and watched the uneventful arrest unfold, but no one interfered. By the time the officer returned to the police car where Detective Littlemore was waiting, the men were back at work as if nothing had happened.
'Why'd you run away yesterday, Mr Chong?'
'I no run,' said Chong. 'I go to work. See? I go to work.'
'I'm going to have to charge you as an accessory to murder. You understand what that means? You could hang.' Littlemore made a gesture conveying the meaning of the last word he had spoken.
'I don't know anything,' the Chinese man pleaded. 'Leon go away. Then smell come from Leon room. That's all.'
'Sure,' said the detective. Littlemore had the officer take Chong Sing to the Tombs. The detective stayed behind. He wanted a closer look at the docks. The puzzle pieces were reconfiguring themselves in the detective's mind — and beginning to fit together. Littlemore knew he was going to find clay at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, and he had a hunch that George Banwell might have stepped in that clay.
Everyone knew Banwell was building the Manhattan Bridge towers. When Mayor McClellan awarded the contract to Banwell's American Steel Company, the Hearst papers had cried corruption, condemning the mayor for favoring an old friend and gleefully predicting delays, breakdowns, and overcharges. In fact, Banwell got those towers up not only within budget but in record time. He had personally supervised the construction — which gave Littlemore his idea.
Littlemore walked toward the river, blending into the mass of men. He could mix with pretty much anyone, if he wanted. Littlemore was good at seeming easy because he was easy, especially when things were falling into place. Chong Sing had two jobs working for Mr George Banwell. Wasn't that interesting?
The detective arrived at the crowded central pier just in time for a change of shifts. Hundreds of dirty, booted men were trudging off the pier, while a long line of others waited to take the elevator down to the caisson. The din of the turbines, a constant mechanical throbbing, filled the air with a furious rhythm.
If you had asked Littlemore how he knew there was some trouble, some unhappiness, in the air as well, he could not have told you. Engaging a few of the men in conversation, he quickly learned of Seamus Malley's bad end. Poor Malley was, the men said, yet another victim of caisson disease. When they opened the elevator door a couple of mornings ago, they found him lying dead, dried blood trailing from his ears and mouth.
The men complained bitterly of the caisson, which they called 'the box' or 'the coffin.' Some thought it cursed. Almost all had ailments they ascribed to it. Most said they were glad their work was almost finished, but the older heads clucked and replied that they'd all be missing their sandhog days soon enough — sandhog being the word for a caisson worker — when their pay stopped coming in. What pay? one of the boys replied. Was three dollars for twelve hours of work supposed to be called pay? 'Look at Malley,' this one said. 'He couldn't even afford a roof over his head with our 'pay.' That's why he's dead. They killed him. They're killing all of us.' But another replied that Malley had a roof, all right; he just also had a wife — that was why he was spending nights down in the box.
Littlemore, observing tracks of red clay all over the pier, knelt to tie his shoes and surreptitiously collected samples. He inquired if Mr Banwell ever came down to the pier. The answer was yes. In fact, he was told, Mr Banwell took at least one trip down to the coffin every day to inspect the work. Sometimes even His Honor, the mayor himself, would go with him.
The detective asked what Banwell was like to work for. Hell, was the answer. The men agreed that Banwell didn't care how many of them died in the caisson, if the job got done faster that way. Yesterday was the first time they could remember when Banwell had ever shown any concern for their lives.
'How's that?' asked Littlemore.
'He told us to forget about Window Five.'
The 'windows,' the men told Littlemore, were the caisson's debris chutes. Each one had a number, and Window Five had jammed up earlier this week. Normally the boss — Banwell — would have immediately ordered them to clear the blockage, a job the sandhogs hated, because it required a difficult, dangerous maneuver with at least one man inside the window when it was inundated with water. But yesterday, for the first time, Banwell told them not to bother. One man suggested the boss might be getting soft. The others denied it; they said Banwell didn't see any point taking chances with the bridge so near completion.
Littlemore chewed this information over. Then he went to the elevator.
The elevator man — a wrinkly codger with not a hair on his head — was perched on a wooden stool inside the car. The detective asked him who locked the elevator door two nights ago, the night Malley died.
'I did,' said the old man, with a proprietary air.
'Was the car up here at the pier when you locked up that night, or was it down below?'
'Up here, o'course. You ain't too quick, are you, young fella? How can my elevator be down there if I'm up here?'
The question was a good one. The elevator was manually operated. Only a man inside the car could take her up or bring her down. Hence when the elevator man completed his last run of the night, the car was necessarily up at the pier. But if the elevator man had asked Littlemore a good question, the detective replied with a better one. 'So how did he get up here?'
'What?'
'The dead guy,' said Littlemore. 'Malley. He stayed below Tuesday night, when everybody else came up?'
'That's right.' The old man shook his head. 'Blamed fool. Not the first time, neither. I told him he oughtn'ta. I told him.'
'And they found him right here in your car, at the pier, the next morning?'
'That's right. Dead as a dead fish. You can still see his blood. I been trying to clean it off two whole days now, and I can't. Washed it with soap, washed it with soda. See it?'
'So how did he get up here?' asked the detective again.
Chapter Nineteen
Carl Jung stood straight and tall in the doorway to Freud's suite. He was fully, formally dressed. Nothing in his demeanor suggested a man who had just been playing with sticks and stones on the floor of his hotel room.
Freud, in vest and shirtsleeves, begged his guest to make himself comfortable. His instinct told him this interview was decisive. Jung decidedly did not look right. Freud gave no credence to Brill's accusations, but he began to agree that Jung might be spinning out of his — Freud's — orbit.
Jung was, Freud knew, more intelligent and creative than any of his other followers — the first one with the potential to break new ground. But Jung undoubtedly had a father complex. When, in one of his earliest letters, Jung begged Freud for a photograph of himself, saying he would 'cherish' it, Freud was flattered. But when he explicitly asked Freud to regard him not as an equal but as a son, Freud became concerned. He told himself then he would have to take special care.
It occurred to Freud that, as far as he knew, Jung did not have any other male friends. Rather, Jung surrounded himself with women, many women — too many. That was the other difficulty. Given Hall's communication, Freud no longer could avoid a conversation with Jung about the girl who had written claiming to be Jung's patient and mistress. Freud had seen the unconscionable letter Jung sent to the girl's mother. On top of all this, there was Ferenczi's report on the state of Jung's hotel room.
The one point on which Freud had no qualms was Jung's belief in the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis. In their private letters and in hours of private talk, Freud had tested, prodded, probed. There could be no doubt: Jung fully believed in. the sexual aetiology. And he had come to his conviction in the best of all possible ways, overcoming his own skepticism after seeing Freud's hypotheses confirmed again and again in clinical practice.
