burst.
After a Shabbat supper during which he nodded and smiled at Laura and the children, hearing them but not listening, he went into the laundry room that Laura had converted to a studio, carrying an armful of books and monographs checked out of the library at National Headquarters. The room was bright-he'd left the light on before Sabbath, stacked Laura's stretched canvases neatly on the floor. Sitting among rolls of fabrics and tins of wax, jars filled with brushes and paint-encrusted palettes, he began to read.
Case histories of serial killers: Landru; Herman Mudgett; Albert Fish, who murdered and ate little children; Peter Kurten, a nauseating excuse for a human being who had well earned the nickname Dusseldorf Monster. According to one expert, the Germans produced a disproportionate number of sex murders-something to do with an impoverished collective unconscious.
And, of course, Jack the Ripper. Rereading a book on the Ripper case give him pause, because some experts were convinced the scourge of Whitechapel had been a Jew-a shohet whose experience as a ritual slaughterer made him an expert in anatomy. He remembered what Dr. Levi had said, and he thought of the shohtim he knew: Mori Gerafi, a tiny, kind Yemenite who seemed too gentle for the job. Rabbi Landau, who worked out of the Mehane Yehuda market. Learned men, pious and scholarly. The thought of them carving up women was absurd.
He put the Ripper book aside and forged onward.
Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis-people chasing pleasure in hideous ways. Interpol and FBI reports-the German theory notwithstanding, America seemed to have more serial killers than any other country. One estimate said there were forty or forty of them doing their dirty work at any given time, more than five hundred unresolved serial murders. The FBI had begun to program a computer in order to catalog all of it.
Thirty roving monsters. Such cruelty, such evil.
Street-corner Mengeles. Why had God created them?
He finished at two in the morning, dry-mouthed and heavy-lidded, Laura's drawing lamp the sole illumination in the silent, dark apartment.
Was it happening right now? The ritual, the outrage-an inert body laid out for dissection?
Knowing his dreams would be polluted, he went to sleep.
He awoke at dawn, expecting bad news. None came and he faked his way through Shabbat.
At nine on Sunday morning he filled an attache case with papers and went to see Dr. Ben David. The psychologist's main office was at Hebrew University but he kept a suite for private consultations in the front rooms of his flat on Rehov Ramban.
Daniel arrived early and shared the claustrophobic waiting room with a tired-looking woman who hid from eye contact behind the international edition of Time magazine. Ten minutes before the hour, Ben David came out of the treatment room with a skinny, large-eyed boy of about five. The boy looked at Daniel and smiled shyly. The detective smiled back and wondered what could trouble such a young child so deeply that he needed a psychologist.
The woman put the Time into her purse and stood.
'All right,' said Ben David heartily, in English. 'I'll see Ronny the same time next week.'
'Thank you, Doctor.' She took her son by the hand and the two of them left quickly.
'Daniel,' said Ben David, taking the detective's hand in both of his and shaking it energetically. He was a young man, in his early thirties, medium-sized and heavyset, with bushy black hair, a full dark beard, light-blue eyes that never rested, and a fitful nature that had taken Daniel by surprise the first time they'd met. He'd always thought of psychotherapists as passive, quiet. Listening and nodding, waiting for you to talk so they could pounce with interpretations. The one he'd seen at the rehab center had certainly fit the stereotype.
'Hello, Eli. Thank you for seeing me.'
'Come in.'
Ben David ushered him into the treatment room, a smallish, untidy office lined with bookshelves and furnished with a small desk, three sturdy chairs, and a low circular table upon which sat a dollhouse in the shape of a Swiss chalet, doll furniture, and half a dozen miniature human figurines. Behind the desk was a credenza piled high with papers and toys. Next to the papers were an aluminium coffepot, cups, and a sugar bowl. No couch, no inkblots. A single Renoir print on the wall. The room smelled pleasantly of modeling clay.
Daniel sat on one of the chairs. The psychologist went to the crcdenza.
'Coffee?'
'Please.'
Ben David prepared two cups, gave Daniel his, and sat down opposite him, sipping. He was wearing a faded burgundy polo shirt that exposed a hard, protuberant belly, baggy dark-green corduroy trousers, and scuffed loafers without socks. His hair looked disheveled; his beard needed trimming. Casual, careless even, like a graduate student on holiday. Not like a doctor at all, but such were the perquisites of status. Ben David had been an academic prodigy, chief of the army's psychological service at twenty-seven, a full professor two years later. Daniel supposed he could dress any way he pleased.
'So, my friend.' The psychologist smiled cursorily, then shifted in the chair, moving his shoulders with almost tic-like abruptness. 'I don't know what I can tell you that we haven't covered on Gray Man.'
'I'm not sure, myself.' Daniel pulled the forensic reports and crime summaries out of his case and handed them over. He drank coffee and waited as the psychologist read.
'Okay,' said Ben David, scanning quickly and looking up after a few moments. 'What do you want to know, specifically?'
'What do you think about the washing of the bodies? What's the meaning of it?'
Ben David sat back in his chair, flipped one leg over the other, and ran his fingers through his hair.
'Let me start with the same warning I gave you before. Everything I tell you is pure speculation. It could be wrong. Okay?'
