Blood Memory

Fourth of July fireworks. You see shadows at the edges of all that. You know bad things happen, that evil exists. You’ve worked a few murder cases. But mostly it’s abstract. The policemen to whom you lend your skills see more of the reality, but cops work very hard at denial. The ones who don’t eat their service weapons, anyway.”

Malik’s pale cheeks color with passion. “But here there is no denial. In this office, I shut out nothing. Here the shadows come out and play. These walls have heard the most depraved acts of humanity recounted in all their sickening detail.” He sits back in his chair and speaks quietly. “Here, Catherine, I deal with the worst thing in the world.”

I fold my hands over my knees. “Don’t you think you might be overdramatizing a bit?”

“You think so?” A humorless chuckle escapes Malik’s lips. “What’s the worst scourge of mankind? War?”

“I suppose so. War and the things that go with it.”

“I’ve seen war.” He gestures at the stone Buddha staring placidly from the sideboard. “Hand-to-hand savagery and anonymous slaughter. I’ve been shot. I’ve killed human beings. But what I’ve seen and heard inside this drab little office building is worse. Far worse.”

The psychiatrist speaks with such conviction that I’m not sure what to say. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“To answer your question.”

“Which question?”

“The same one all your friends are asking out there in the world. ‘Why won’t he give us the names of his patients? What’s the big deal?’”

I let the silence stretch out, hoping to dissipate some of Malik’s intensity. “I still think that the imminent danger to innocent people outweighs your patients’ right to privacy.”

“It’s so easy to say that, Catherine. What if I told you that the majority of my patients are Holocaust survivors? Survivors of concentration camps that were never liberated, and that some of them still live with their Nazi guards?”

“That’s not a fair analogy. It’s not true.”

“You’re wrong.” Malik’s eyes flash. “Children suffering prolonged and repeated sexual abuse are living in concentration camps. They’re under the power of despots on whom they depend for their very survival. They suffer terror and torture on a daily basis. Their own siblings, and often their mothers, betray them in the struggle for survival. Any identity these children have is systematically destroyed, and hope isn’t even a memory. Make no mistake, Doctor, there’s a holocaust going on all around us. Only most of us prefer not to see it.”

Nathan Malik’s preternatural calm has given way to a deep and abiding anger. He is nothing like the psychiatrists I’ve seen as a patient. At some level, I always craved this kind of passion in my therapists. But in truth, it’s not their proper role. This kind of passion in a therapist is dangerous.

In a neutral voice, I say, “My memory from med school is that therapists should maintain objectivity at all costs. You sound more like a patient advocate than a dispassionate clinician.”

“Should one be objective in the face of a holocaust? Just because one happens to be a physician? Do you know how many American women are believed to have suffered sexual abuse as children? One in three. One in three. That’s tens of millions of women. That’s women in your family, Catherine. For men, it’s between one in four and one in seven.”

I force myself to maintain my neutral tone. “Believed by whom?”

“That’s hard data, not propaganda from some victims’ group. The average duration of incestuous abuse is four years. Half of abused children are assaulted by multiple perpetrators. You want to know more, Doctor?”

“I’m a little confused,” I say softly. “Are you treating children or adults?”

With an explosive movement Malik stands, as though the chair can no longer contain him. He’s only about five-nine, but he radiates a power that seems to have its origin in his unearthly stillness. He projects a centeredness I’ve only seen in devotees of the martial arts.

“You’re speaking in a chronological sense,” he says, his voice almost too quiet for me to hear. “I can’t afford to make such distinctions. A child’s emotional development is typically frozen in whatever stage he or she was in at the time the abuse occurred. Sometimes I don’t know whether I’m dealing with an adult or a child until the patient opens her mouth.”

“So…what you’re talking about now is repressed memories. Right?”

Malik hasn’t moved toward me, but he suddenly seems much closer than he did before. And the SWAT team seems a lot farther away than it did a minute ago. My eyes go to the samurai sword on the wall to my left. Its placement opposite the Buddha on the right wall creates a disturbing impression of extremes: peace and war, serenity and violence.

“I think you know what I’m talking about,” Malik says. “Doctor.”

For the first time since entering the office, I am afraid. My scalp is tingling, and my palms are wet. The man before me isn’t the man I knew in medical school. Physically, he is. But emotionally he has evolved into something else. The psychiatrist I knew was an observer, essentially impotent. This man is as far from impotent as I can imagine, and his agenda remains a mystery to me.

“I need to pee,” I say lamely.

“Down the hall,” Malik replies, his expression unchanging. “Last door on the right.”

As I walk to the door, I feel as though his words emerged from the simplest cells in his brain, while the higher functions remained totally focused on his internal landscape-of which I am clearly a part.

Alone in the corridor, I exhale as though I’ve been holding in a single breath for fifteen minutes. I don’t need to pee, but I walk down the hall anyway, certain that Malik would notice a lack of footsteps. As I pass an open door on my left, I see a man covered in black body armor kneeling in the doorway with a stubby submachine gun. His eyes track me as I pass, but he doesn’t move.

When I pull open the bathroom door, I find John Kaiser standing inside. He quickly motions for me to enter the tiny cubicle.

“Do you really have to pee?” he asks.

“No. I just had to get out of there. He jumped up from his desk, and it scared me.”

The FBI agent squeezes my upper arm, his hazel eyes reassuring. “Do you feel you’re in danger?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t really threaten me. It just felt scary.”

“You’re doing great, Cat. Can you handle going back in?”

I turn the taps on the little sink and splash cold water on my neck. “Is it really doing any good?”

“Are you kidding? This conversation is the only window we have into this guy’s head.”

I lean back against the wall and dry my neck with a paper towel. “Okay.”

“Do you feel confident enough to try to provoke him a little?”

“Jesus. How do you suggest I do that?”

Kaiser gives me a smile that tells me he knows me better than I thought. “I don’t think you need any suggestions in that area. Do you?”

“I guess not.”

“If you feel threatened, don’t hesitate to pull the plug. We’ll have him facedown on the floor in five seconds.”

“Alive or dead?”

“That’s his choice.” Kaiser’s eyes almost glitter in their hardness.

“Is it?”

The FBI agent reaches behind him and flushes the toilet. “You’re right where you like to be, Cat. On the edge. Go nail this guy.”

Chapter 17

Nathan Malik is standing at the sideboard, lighting a cone of incense on a burner before the Buddha. A tendril of gray smoke spirals upward, and the aroma of sandalwood reaches me. When he returns to his desk and takes his