The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [60]
Señora Linares, meanwhile, sent a note along to Miss Howard saying that her husband was definitely getting suspicious about her absences and that this was probably the last time she’d be able to get away: whatever we needed, we’d have to get it Thursday evening. As for the detective sergeants, their rousting of the Cubans had produced nothing except a lot of bad feeling, and they came away from the encounter convinced that nobody in the Cuban Revolutionary Party had the brains or the organizing skill to pull off anything like the kidnapping of Ana Linares. This little confirmation of his theory that the abductor was a woman acting alone sent the Doctor back into his study Wednesday afternoon, and by the following morning he still hadn’t emerged; his food was taken in on trays, and he left strict orders not to be disturbed. Mr. Moore and Miss Howard dropped by at around two on Thursday to plan strategy for the sketching session. On finding the Doctor still closeted away, they asked me what was going on, to which I answered that I really didn’t know, being as I hadn’t seen him for twenty-four hours. It was time, however, to get things prepared for the evening to come, so together the three of us decided to go on up to the study and find out what was happening.
Mr. Moore knocked on the door and got a sharp “Go away, please!” in return. He looked to me, but all I could do was shrug.
“Kreizler?” Mr. Moore said. “What the hell’s going on, you’ve been in there for two days—and it’s time to get ready for the portrait!”
A long, exasperated groan came from inside the study, and then the door unlocked from within. The Doctor, dressed in a smoking jacket and slippers, pulled it open, his face in a book. “Yes, and I could be in here for two years before I’d find anything really useful.” He looked up at us blankly, then, with a tilt of his head, signaled that we should follow him in.
The study was lined on three sides with mahogany shelves and paneling, while the Doctor’s large desk sat in front of the window in the fourth wall. There were piles of open books everywhere, along with journals and monographs, also open. Some looked as though they’d been placed where they lay; some had clearly been thrown.
“I have been attempting,” the Doctor announced, “to assemble some research with which we can make ourselves acquainted with the psychological peculiarities inherent in the woman-child relationship. And I have, not for the first time, been disappointed by my colleagues.”
Mr. Moore grinned and cleared some journals off of a sofa, then plopped down onto it. “Well, that’s good news,” he said. “Then we don’t have to do any lessons this time around, eh?”
He was referring to the Beecham case, during which the Doctor’d made everyone on the team read not only the basic psychological works of the day but also articles written by specialists what had particular application to the investigation. Cyrus and I had done most of the reading, too, just to keep up; and it had been, I don’t mind saying, tough going. There can’t be many people in the world what can blow wind like your average psychologists and alienists.
The Doctor just frowned at Mr. Moore. “Assuming that you have retained even a portion of what you learned last year,” he said in some disgust, “then no, I don’t know that there’s a great deal more to be done. It’s idiotic. Perfectly sound, rational men, when they reach one specific instinct—the maternal—begin to blather like idiots! Listen to the august Herr G. H. Schneider—one of James’s favorites, John.” (Mr. Moore had been at Harvard with the Doctor and had also studied, though very briefly, with Professor James.) “‘As soon as a wife becomes a mother her whole thought and feeling, her whole being, is altered. Until then she had only thought of her own well-being, of the satisfaction of her vanity; the whole world appeared made only for her; everything that went on about her was only noticed so far as it had personal reference to herself—now, however’”—and here a wicked kind of sarcasm came into the Doctor’s voice—“ ‘the centre of