Irresistible Impulse (27 page)

“He told you all this?”

Perlsteiner smiled. “Oh, yes. He was the kind you wish they would shut up for one moment. But you know, it was all
material
. You understand, it is cheap—psychically, I mean—to utter material. It is not at all the same as working with the deeper feelings. He shows the signs of having spent much time with mediocre psychiatrists. Well trained to spout. Shall I continue? It is very interesting, I assure you.”

“Please,” said Karp.

“All right, so we find at an early age the boy begins to show signs of oddness. He will not play with other children, for example. He is slow to walk and speak. Perhaps retarded? No, they test him; he is normal, perhaps a bit above. But the behavior! Most significantly, he has, by the age of four, one habit that disturbs the parents: he rubs his face and hands with pigmented material, of preference brown or black in color. He uses for this paints, chocolate, ashes, earth, mud, whatever he can. Of course, the parents are concerned. They take him again to a specialist, this time a—you must pardon the expression—a child psychiatrist, who assures them that this is normal behavior to the anal period.”

“Is it?”

Perlsteiner gave him a look both sharp and pitying. “It is not, and there is no such thing as an anal period. To resume, they wait, but it does not stop. They cannot take him anywhere for fear he will make an embarrassment. At last the poppa loses patience. He tells Clarice, who is, of course, in complete charge of disciplining the child, no more with the paint and mud! He must be scrubbed when he does it with the floor brush and the laundry soap on the face. So he is, and so the behavior stops, or at least it no longer appears where it can annoy the poppa. Now, at our remove, we can see what has happened. The father is a stranger, prone to violence; the mother is ‘nervous’ and cannot bear the ordinary conflicts of child rearing. All the love and discipline the child knows comes from the servant. Yet when the child looks at himself, he sees he is not like the maid in appearance: he is pale, she is dark. So he wishes to correct this and does.”

“Wait a second, Doc,” Karp objected. “Thousands of white kids have been raised just that way by black nannies. It’s an American institution, or it was. But those kids didn’t go around painting themselves.”

“True, so far as we know. But also thousands of little boys were raised by authoritarian Austrian officials and sad mothers, and only one of them grew up to be Adolf Hitler. Did you know that Hitler’s father was an avid beekeeper? Perhaps this, then, explains the pattern of Nazism and the führer principle, eh? No, we do not, we never
predict
from the material; it is impossible. But sometimes we can see an interesting pattern that may help us understand where the development has gone wrong. So, to continue, the servant Clarice is in charge of this punishment, and also the source of all rewards too. She had, by the way, four children of her own, who were being raised by her own mother while she stayed at the Rohblings’ home and raised their little boy. A common situation, with emotional results that no one has ever bothered to discuss. Now, Clarice was a great believer in regular bowel movements. So who is not, eh? Especially at the time. But Clarice, it appears, was something of a fanatic on the subject. When the regularity was not such as she would wish, she resorted to enemas. As a rule, of course, children object to getting enemas, and so this also became part of the punishment regime. But because of certain aspects of the male anatomy, the enema is often sexually pleasurable. Also, Rohbling tells me, Clarice was in the habit of removing her uniform when she gave him this treatment, to avoid the wet and the mess spoiling her appearance, her white uniform. Or so she said. And so we must imagine the scene. The huge, half- naked colored woman in the bathroom. The boy is helpless, held down. Sometimes she would tie his arms with a towel. She inserts the nozzle. He is screaming in rage, but also he experiences these nice feelings. His penis erects.” Perlsteiner shrugged, smiled bleakly. “A potent mix. Shame, helplessness, sexual pleasure, the surrogate mother, love and hatred. And she also touched him sexually.”

“Jesus!”

“Oh, it is far from uncommon, you know. The nursemaids of King Louis XIV used to entertain themselves by manually bringing the little prince to orgasm, and I don’t doubt that such things still go on and not just to princes. In any case, that is the background. By the way, these sessions lasted to the age of twelve. At that time they stopped, and Clarice left the Rohblings’ service.”

“He ratted on her?”

“Far from it. He was devastated when she left. He says. No, they felt that since he was going to boarding school, they had no need of a permanent nursemaid.”

“And this is connected to the murders.”

“It is hard to think otherwise. The boy becomes obsessed with elderly black women. Now that he is adult, he can indulge his desire to become a Negro, and he does. He seeks these women out, becomes friendly with them. And … here, significantly, he is less forthcoming. What are the events leading to the actual homicides? He doesn’t recall. He meant them no harm.”

“What do you think happened, Doctor?” Karp asked.

The old man rubbed the bridge of his nose and stuck his lower lip out speculatively. “Well, one cannot say for certain, but given the background, we may suppose that he requested that they provide the same service that Clarice did. A respectable colored woman asked by a stranger for such a thing would be shocked and outraged. There were altercations perhaps, and then perhaps he panicked. The means he used are indicative of a panicked reaction. He does not use a knife, or gun, or even a garrote. No, he used a suitcase. If I were still a Freudian, I would say, a symbol of that long-ago departure.” He smiled. “Who can say, at last, what goes on in here?” He tapped his skull. “But in any case, after the first one we see the development of an obsessive pattern, leading in each case to the death of the woman.”

“Obsessive,” said Karp, not liking the word. “Are you suggesting that he couldn’t control himself?”

Perlsteiner snorted. “That is a meaningless tautology, my friend. Clearly, he did
not
control himself in the event. Most of us are obsessive about something. Observe this office! Is it not the office of a man who is obsessive about throwing things away? So, am I crazy? Maybe, but not a criminal, because my obsession is not against the law. Rohbling’s obsession was, which is why we are here.”

“As simple as that, huh?”

Perlsteiner chuckled. “Yes, but the law complicates things, yes? Look, let me ask you—are you a collector?”

“You mean, like stamps?”

“Yes! Stamps, coins, art, books … anything.”

“No, I’m not,” said Karp. He wondered whether successful homicide prosecutions qualified as collectibles, but decided they did not.

“Ah, well, then it may be difficult for you to understand the obsessive mentality. I myself was for many years a book collector.” As he said this, his eyes closed for a moment as if he were experiencing a different time and place. Then, suddenly, he fixed Karp with a look both intense and amused. “Let me give you an example,” he said. “This was in Vienna, about 1930. I was just married and completing my studies, and I was an avid book collector, to the extent that I could afford it, which was not much. One day I entered Winkelmann’s shop, on the Ring, which to me was Aladdin’s cave, and suddenly, there in its case, I see it. A first edition, 1825, of Heine’s
Lyrisches Intermezzo
, and not only a first edition, but Heine’s own copy, with autographic annotations. In the poet’s own hand, you understand. I was in rapture until I saw the price. Let me see … perhaps it was the same as twenty thousand dollars now, an impossible sum. Now, in the next moment I recalled that my dear wife possessed an emerald and diamond necklace, handed down in her family for generations. In an instant the scheme sprang full-blown into my mind. I would fake a theft. The necklace was insured. I would sell it, and with the money I would buy the book. I had to have it—the thought of not having it was unbearable, excruciating. As I say, all this sprang ready-formed into my mind, and seemed for the moment perfectly reasonable. This is obsession in its purest form.”

Perlsteiner sighed and rubbed the underside of his wrist. His shirt rode up enough for Karp to see the blurred blue numbers tattooed there.

“Did you do it?” Karp asked after a silence.

“No, I did not. In me the social control was more powerful than the obsession. I shuddered at what I had been thinking and left the shop. Had I done this crime, however, I would have been doing what Rohbling is doing now. Denying to myself that I was to blame. That I meant any harm. And so forth.”

“So the bottom line is, he knew what he was doing was wrong.”

“Of course he did,” said Perlsteiner. “And it afforded him the intensest pleasure, you can be sure, which is why he repeats it. Now, it is bizarre, no doubt, this behavior, and the behavior of people with mental illness is also bizarre, but we must be careful not to confuse the two. So, there it is: you will have my report in, say, two days. This is agreeable?”

It was. Karp took his leave feeling rather better than he had before. If Perlsteiner was willing to testify that Rohbling knew what he was doing and that it was wrong, then Karp had the basis for a prosecution. But only a basis; he would have to convince twelve ordinary people that a set of behaviors that every one of them would have classified as “crazy” was not evidence of insanity in the exculpatory legal sense.

Karp went back to his office and wandered through near-deserted halls until he came to the office of V.T. Newbury in the Fraud Bureau. Somewhat to his surprise, V.T. was still there, and Karp went in.

No institutional furniture for V.T. Karp sat himself in a leather sling chair that had never seen a procurement order and smiled across the mahogany banker’s desk at his friend.

“Don’t you have a family to go home to?” V.T. asked. “I thought it’d be Monday before you got back to me. In any case, I’m impressed.”

“Thank you. What’s up?”

“Well, I thought you might want to take a look at our dear and glorious physician in the flesh. We’re having him on Monday for a chat.”

“You made your move.”

“Yes, the impetuous Menotti has struck. The war rants were issued today, and at this moment federal marshals are racking up overtime seizing records. Menotti’s got a team assembled to dig into the stuff over the long weekend.”

“What, he doesn’t want his turkey?”

“I think he plans to feast on Dr. Robinson this year. So—you interested?”

“Fascinated, but I got this trial. I could come by afterward, though, late afternoon. You think he’ll still be there?”

“Oh, he’ll be there,” V.T. replied confidently. “We have much to discuss. How’s the trial? I hear you have your jury.”

“Yeah. Also, Perlsteiner says he’s not crazy.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Just another sane average granny killer in blackface, hey?”

Karp rolled his eyes. “Bite your tongue, V.T.,” he said.

Marlene sat on the living room couch with her daughter, reading and rubbing each other’s feet. The twins were blessedly napping, simultaneously for a change, Posie was off for the weekend, and Karp was at the office, using the pre-Christmas lull to catch up on neglected duties. A rare moment of peace, this, or should have been. Marlene was looking forward to Christmas with her family, as she always did, and, despite herself, rolling over in her mind the most recent Thanksgiving dinner, which she had spent at Karp’s father’s place. After a dozen years of marriage to Karp she still had not grown used to the barbarism of his family. From the first year, the deal (and it
was
a deal) was that Thanksgiving would be spent with the Karps, and Christmas would be with the Ciampis. Karp’s father, who had made a small fortune in corrugated boxes, and like most of the self-made rich was used to getting his way, had never entirely accepted that he was not to have
all
his grandchildren around him at Yuletide (which, as an elaborately assimilated Jew, he had made his very own) to squeal at his overexpensive presents and do him honor. Marlene had early made this a divorce-court issue, holding to the principle
Natale con i tuoi e Pasqua con chi vuoi:
you spent Christmas with your family and Easter, or Thanksgiving, with whom you pleased.

The event itself was always the same, and might have been specifically designed (in her more paranoid moments Marlene thought it literally might have) to produce irritation on a grand scale. The gathering consisted of Karp’s two older brothers, one a CPA and the other the president of daddy’s firm, their lovely wives, the elder Karp’s lovely wife, a former starlet not ten years older than her oldest stepson, six assorted children, ranging from three to twelve, plus, of course, Butch and Marlene and their three. After the meal, which was immense (prepared and served in sullen silence by Edna, the family retainer), it was the custom for the children to run screaming around the house, for the men to lock themselves in the “study” and watch the football games, and for the women to sit in the living room and talk, and referee the constant squabbles of the children. All three women were bores. The starlet stepmother had the grace to keep fairly mum and slip, as the afternoon progressed, into her accustomed boozy somnolence, but the sisters-in-law had strong opinions about everything and the sensitivity of tyrannosaurs. As they were upper West Side Jewish matrons, these opinions were (Israeli politics aside) all virulently liberal, and however the conversation began, Marlene always found herself forced into the position of defending both her husband (that persecutor of the downtrodden criminal classes) and her church (that persecutor of everything else) from the abortion policies of the current pope to the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition.

Inevitably, around the third quarter of the game, Marlene, who by then was starting to think that the Inquisition was not an entirely bad idea, would storm into the men’s retreat and give Karp a Look. Then, after a brief conversation in the hallway, conducted in harsh whispers, the Karps would make their excuses and leave, not, if the truth be told, much missed.