would not be able to get out. Then I realized the key must be for getting in, not out.
Though it was hateful to me in every possible way, I was obliged at last to concede the truth of Freud's Oedipus theory. I had held out against it so long. To be sure, several of my patients had produced confessions onto which I could have imposed an Oedipal interpretation. But I had never had a patient admit, point-blank, without interpretive gloss, to incestuous desires.
Nora had admitted hers. I expect I admired her selfawareness. But I was irredeemably repulsed.
'To a nunnery, go.' I was thinking of Hamlet's repeated injunction to Ophelia, right after 'to be, or not to be,' to get herself to a convent. Would she be 'a breeder of sinners'? he asks her. 'Be thou as chaste as ice… thou shalt not escape calumny.' Would she paint her face? 'God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another.'
I think my heart's reasoning was as follows: I knew I could not stand to touch Nora now. I could hardly stand to think of her — that way. But I was damned if I would stand the thought of any other man touching her either.
I know how irrational my reaction was. Nora wasn't responsible for what she felt. She didn't choose to have incestuous desires, did she? I knew this, but it changed nothing.
I rose from the bench, running my hands through my hair. I made myself concentrate on the medical aspects of the case. I was still her doctor. Clinically speaking, Nora's admission that she had witnessed last night's assault from above was much more important than her acknowledgment of her Oedipal wishes. I had told her that such experiences were common in dreaming, but when combined with the very real cigarette burn on her skin, her account sounded closer to psychosis. She probably needed more than analysis. In all likelihood, she ought to be hospitalized. Get thee to a sanatorium.
Nevertheless, I could not bring myself to believe that she had inflicted the initial set of wounds — the brutal whipping she suffered Monday — on herself. Nor was I prepared to acknowledge as a certainty that last night's attack was an hallucination. Some memory associated with medical school flashed in and out of my head.
New York University was not far downtown. As it turned out, the gate to Gramercy Park was indeed locked shut. I had to climb out — and felt, unaccountably, like a criminal as I did so.
Walking through Washington Square, I crossed under Stanford White's monumental arch and wondered at the murderousness of love. What else might the great architect have built if he hadn't been gunned down by a mad, jealous husband, the same man whom Jelliffe was trying to have released from the asylum? Down the street was New York University's excellent library.
I began with Professor James's work on nitrous oxide, which I already knew well from Harvard, but saw nothing there meeting the description. The general anaesthesiology texts were one and all useless. So I turned to the psychical literature. The card catalog had an entry on astral projection, but it proved to be a piece of theosophical raving. Then I came across a dozen entries under bilocation. Through these, after a couple of hours of digging, I finally found what I was looking for.
I was fortunate: Durville provided several references in his just-published book on apparitions. Bozzano had reported a highly suggestive case, and Osty an even clearer one in the May-June Revue Metapsychique. But it was a case I found in Battersby that eliminated all doubt. Battersby quoted the following account:
I struggled violently so that two nurses and the specialist were unable to hold me… The next thing I knew was some piercing screaming going on, that I was up in the air and looking down upon the bed over which the nurses and doctor were bending. I was aware that they were trying in vain to stop the screaming; in fact I heard them say: 'Miss B., Miss B., don't scream like this. You are frightening the other patients.' At the same time I knew very well that I was quite apart from my screaming body, which I could do nothing to stop.
I didn't have a telephone number for Detective Littlemore, but I knew he worked in the new police headquarters downtown. If I could not find him there in the flesh, at least I would be able to leave word.
Chapter Twenty
In the Van den Heuvel building, a messenger boy ran up to Coroner Hugel's office to announce that an ambulance had just delivered another dead body to the morgue. Unmoved, the coroner dismissed the boy; but the youngster wouldn't go. It wasn't just any body, the boy said, it was Detective Littlemore's body. The coroner, surrounded by boxes and loose papers stacked in piles all over his floor, swore and ran down to the basement faster than the boy himself.
Littlemore's body was not in the morgue. It was in the laboratory antechamber, where Hugel did his autopsies. The detective had been wheeled in on a gurney and deposited on one of the operating tables. The ambulance men were already gone.
Hugel and the messenger boy froze at the sight of the detective's twisted body. Hugel took the boy's shoulder in too tight a grip.
'My God,' said the coroner. 'It's all my fault.'
'No, it isn't, Mr Hugel,' said the body, opening its eyes.
The messenger boy screamed.
'Martin fucking Luther!' said Hugel.
The detective sat up and brushed off his lapels. He saw on the coroner's face a mixture, in roughly equal parts, of lingering grief and accumulating fury. 'Sorry, Mr Hugel,' he said sheepishly. 'I just thought we might have an ace in the hole if the guy who wanted to kill me thought he had pulled it off.'
The coroner stalked away. Littlemore leapt from the table; the moment he hit the floor, he cried out in pain. His right leg was much worse than he had realized. He followed at Hugel's heels, describing his theory of the death of Seamus Malley.
'Preposterous' was Hugel's reply. He continued up the stairs, refusing even to look back at Littlemore, limping up behind him. 'Why would Banwell, having killed this Malley, drag his dead body into the elevator? For company on the ride up?'
'Maybe Malley dies on the way up the elevator.'
'Oh, I see,' said the coroner. 'Banwell kills him in the elevator, then leaves him there in order to maximize the probability of his being apprehended for two murders. Banwell is not stupid, Detective. He is a calculating man. Had he done what you claim, he would have taken the elevator straight back down to the caisson and disposed of this Malley in the same way you say he disposed of the Riverford girl.'
'But the clay, Mr Hugel, I forgot to tell you about the clay — '
'I don't want to hear it,' said the coroner. They had arrived at his office. 'I don't want to hear any more about it. Go to the mayor, why don't you? No doubt you'll find a ready audience with him. I told you, the case is closed.'
Littlemore blinked and shook his head. He noticed the stacks of documents and the packing boxes spread out on the office floor. 'Are you going somewhere, Mr Hugel?'
'As a matter of fact, I am,' said the coroner. 'I'm quitting this employ.'
'Quitting?'
'I cannot work under these conditions. My conclusions are not respected.'
'But where will you go, Mr Hugel?'
'You think this is the only city that requires a medical examiner?' The coroner surveyed the boxes of records strewn about his office. 'I understand a position is available in Cleveland, Ohio, as a matter of fact. My opinions will be valued there. They will pay me less, of course, but that is no matter; I have a substantial sum set aside already. No one will be able to complain about my records, Detective. My successor will find a perfectly organized system — which I created. Do you know what the state of the morgue was before I came here?'
'But Mr Hugel,' said the detective.
At that moment, Louis Riviere and Stratham Younger appeared in the corridor. 'Monsieur Littlemore!' cried Riviere. 'He's alive!'
'Unfortunately,' agreed the coroner. 'Gentlemen, if you'll excuse me, I have work to do.'
Clara Banwell was cooling herself in a bath when she heard the front door slam shut. It was a Turkish bath, with blue inlaid Mudejar tiles from Andalusia, installed in the Banwells' apartment at Clara's special request. As her
