“I’m Lakshmi.”
“Lakshmi, I need you to do something for me.” Linda Abruzzi wasn’t the only one who knew psycholinguistics. “I need you to tell Dr. Luka that Special Agent E. L. Pender of the Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to speak with him briefly about a former patient of his, by the name of Simon Childs. We’ll wait here,” he added-it was all about seizing the initiative.
“Hell of a view,” Pender whispered to Dorie, as Lakshmi left the room via a side door.
“Dramatic, anyway,” she replied. “But you could paint it with a roller.”
Lakshmi reappeared, beckoned from the side door, and led Pender and Dorie down another fearfully steep path to the famous Lethe baths, a series of recessed natural hot tubs carved into the side of the cliff over eons by a mineral spring, and canopied by a great granitic overhang that gave the baths the feel and echo of a shallow cavern or grotto. Alone in the hottest and deepest tub, the one nearest the mouth of the spring, sat the hairiest old man Dorie had ever seen naked, or wanted to-white hair to his shoulders, bushy Santa beard, and the matted white pelt covering his chest and arms would have made a yeti reach for the Nair.
“Come on in, the water’s fine.” His accent was a strange hybrid of hip and cultured, of Berkeley and Budapest.
Pender shrugged, pointed to his cast, and sat down on a backless marble bench, facing the tub, with his back to the ocean. He could hear the surf crashing below; silvery reflections from the light playing off the steaming surface of the baths danced on the shiny granite walls of the cliff like hundreds of manic Tinkerbells.
“And you, dear?”
Dorie shuddered as she sat down beside Pender. “I may never take another bath again.”
“Ablutophobia?”
“Simon Childs-ophobia.”
“Oh?”
Dorie looked over at Pender, who nodded. He suspected her story would make a more eloquent argument for Luka’s cooperation than anything he could say. As she spoke, the damp walls of the shallow cavern gradually took on a pinkish glow from the western sky. When she’d finished, Luka asked Pender to give them a moment alone. Pender walked a few dozen paces up the flagstone path and watched the sun hovering twice its width above the curved horizon-he’d never seen anything as vast as that horizon.
Dorie appeared around a bend in the path. “He wants to talk to you now.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He just wanted to make sure I had a good therapist. Said he could give me a couple of names if I needed.”
She told Pender she’d wait for him up at the house. Pender retraced his steps. The light back at the baths was now a refulgent primrose pink-it was like being inside a Tiffany lamp.
“Tell me, Agent Pender,” said Dr. Luka, “is it FBI policy now to schlep victims around on interviews?”
“No, I-”
“Your relationship with Miss Bell is more of a personal nature then, I take it.”
“Yes, we-”
“In that case, let me give you a little professional advice, free of charge: Either Miss Bell has one of the best- integrated psyches in the western world-which her history of severe phobias would tend to argue against-or she’s heading for a psychological blowup of Hindenburgian proportions.”
“But isn’t it possible that it could be kind of, what’s the word,
“I suppose so-but if she were my patient, and I were thirty years younger, I’d kick your ass down that cliff there. Now, what is it you think I can do for you, Agent Pender?”
“Tell me everything you can about Simon Childs-the more we know, the more likely we’ll be able to catch him before anybody else has to go through what Dorie went through. And worse.”
“Oh, my, I have been out of touch, haven’t I? And when was it, precisely, that the privilege of doctor-patient confidentiality was revoked?”
“Come off it, Doc-you know perfectly well that a physician is not only permitted, but
“It’s been thirty-five years, Agent Pender, and my memory isn’t what it once was.”
“Mine either,” said Pender. “I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning. But I can give you chapter and verse of every case I ever worked, and I’m willing to bet you can, too.”
Luka sank down until he was chin deep in the steaming water, with his long white hair fanning out around his head. “Agent Pender, are you familiar with the old joke about the gay man who tells his friend that his mother made him a homosexual?”
“‘If I buy her the yarn, will she make me one, too?’”
“Precisely. And Simon Childs’s mother and grandfather couldn’t have done a better job of making a counterphobic phobic if they’d knitted one from a pattern. The way Simon tells it-or at least the way he told me, back in 1963 (I remember the year, because it was right around the time my friend Jack Kennedy was assassinated)-he was already suffering from multiple specific phobias by the time he and his sister were abandoned by their mother at their paternal grandfather’s proverbial doorstep after their father died-drowned drunk after driving his car into the bay, if I remember correctly.
“First and foremost, understandably enough, little Simon was afraid of drowning. So his grandfather took it upon himself to cure him of his weakness by beating him, holding his head under water, then alternating beatings and dunkings, until Simon had learned to master his terror. Next came fear of the dark, which the grandfather cured by beating him, then locking him in the basement, then beating him some more. After nyctophobia, however, came cynophobia, the fear of dogs (specifically, his grandfather’s two attack-trained Dobermans, as I recall), which the grandfather cured by making him sleep in the kennel-and beating him, of course.
“Subsequent phobias, including the fear of heights, spiders, and mirrors, were cured along similar homeopathic principles, until by the time he reached puberty, Simon told me, he wasn’t afraid of anything. He was equally in denial about his feelings toward his sister, whom his grandfather obviously adored-or indulged, at any rate. But Simon had so internalized his sibling rivalry that he had, in a sense, internalized his sister. It’s a syndrome that’s seen more often with identical twins-not at all healthy, needless to say.”
“Is that why he was in therapy?”
“No-apparently he and a neighbor boy had been caught in flagrante, so to speak, by the grandfather. According to Simon, the two boys had formed something they called the Horror Club. Obviously it was related to the entire gestalt of Simon’s polyphobia and compensatory counterphobia. The boys used to watch horror movies on late-night television, then masturbate together. Of all the reasons for Simon Childs to go into treatment, this adolescent experimentation with homosexuality was about the least important. Except of course to the grandfather. Who killed himself a few weeks after Simon began therapy-I never saw young Childs again after that.”
“Do you happen to remember the other boy’s name? From the Horror Club?”
“I’m afraid not-why?”
“Childs has probably gone to ground somewhere in the Bay Area. We want to cover all the bases.”
“All I can tell you is that his family lived next door to the Childs house in the autumn of 1963, and…No, wait- it’s coming to me. Simon called him-there’s an expression for a timid soul…nervous something? Nervous Norman?”
“Nervous Nellie.”
“Yes, that’s it-Nervous Nellie. Short for Nelson, if memory serves.”
“I don’t suppose you have a last name for me?”
The old psychiatrist sighed. “Now I know how Jesus felt. The more miracles you perform, the more they want.”
7
