The Interpretation Of Murder (12 page)

    The mayor made Coroner Hugel wait an
hour in his anteroom. Impatient under ordinary conditions, Hugel looked irate
now. 'It is obstruction in the first degree,' he cried out, when finally
admitted into Mayor McClellan's office. 'I demand an investigation.'

    George Brinton McClellan, Jr. - son
of the famous Civil War general - was the most intellectually accomplished and
forward-thinking man ever to have held the office of mayor of New York City. In
1909, only a handful of Americans were recognized as authorities on Italian
history; McClellan was one of them. At forty-three, he had already been a
newspaper editor, lawyer, author, congressman, lecturer on European history at
Princeton University, honorary member of the American Society of Architects,
and mayor of the nation's largest city. When the aldermen of New York City
passed a measure in 1908 prohibiting women from smoking in public, McClellan
vetoed it.

    His hold on the mayoralty, however,
was tenuous. The next election was less than nine weeks away, and although the
candidates had not been officially named, McClellan still had no offer of
nomination from any major party or syndicate. He had made two potentially fatal
political mistakes! The first was having in 1905 narrowly defeated William
Randolph Hearst, who ever since had filled his newspapers with sensational
accounts of McClellan's shameless corruption. The second was having broken with
Tammany Hall, which hated him for his incorruptibility. Tammany Hall ran the
Democratic Party in New York City, and the Democrats ran the city. It was a
rewarding arrangement: the Tammany leadership had unburdened the city of at
least $500 million over the years. McClellan had originally been a Tammany
nominee, but once elected he refused to make the brazen patronage appointments
demanded of him. He ousted the most notoriously corrupt officials and brought
charges against many others. He hoped to wrest control of the party from
Tammany, but in this goal he had not yet succeeded.

    On the mayor's walnut desk, in
addition to a copy of all fifteen of the city's major newspapers, was a set of
blueprints. These depicted a soaring suspension bridge, anchored by two
gigantic but marvelously thin towers. Streetcars were shown traversing an upper
deck, while below were six lanes of horse, automobile, and rail traffic. 'Do
you know, Hugel,' said the mayor, 'you are the fifth person today who has
demanded an investigation of one thing or another?'

    'Where did the body go?' Hugel
replied. 'Did it get up and walk away on its two feet?'

    'Look at this,' the mayor replied,
gazing at the blueprints. 'This is the Manhattan Bridge. It has cost thirty
millions to build. I will open it this year, if it is the last thing I do in
office. This arch on the New York side is a perfect replica of the St. Denis portal
in Paris, only twice the size. A century from now, this bridge -'

    'Mayor McClellan, the Riverford girl
-' 'I
know
about the Riverford girl,' McClellan said with sudden
authority. He looked Hugel full in the face: 'What am I supposed to tell Banwell?
What is he to tell the girl's wretched family? Answer me that. Of course there
should have been an investigation; you should have completed it long ago.'

    'I?' asked the coroner. 'Long ago?'

    'How many bodies have we lost in the
past six months, Hugel, including the two unaccounted for after we repaired the
leak? Twenty? You know as well as I do where they are going.'

    'You are not suggesting that I -'

    'Of course not,' said the mayor. 'But
someone on your staff is selling our cadavers to the medical schools. I am told
they are worth five dollars a head.'

    'Am I to blame,' responded Hugel,
'with the conditions I am given - no protection, no guards, the corpses piling
up, no room for them all, sometimes rotting before they can be disposed of?
Every month I have reported on the humiliating conditions at the morgue. But
you leave me in that rabbit warren.'

    'I am sorry for the state of the
morgue,' said McClellan. 'No one could have managed half so well as you have,
given the resources. But you have turned a blind eye to this stealing of
cadavers, and I am about to pay the price for it. You will interrogate every
member of your staff. You will contact every medical school in the city. I want
that body found.'

    'This body is not at a medical
school,' the coroner objected. 'I had already performed the autopsy. I had
ventilated the lungs, for God's sake, to confirm asphyxiation.'

    'What of it?'

    'No medical school wants a cadaver
after an autopsy. You want your body intact.'

    'So the thieves made a mistake.'

    'There was no mistake,' said the
coroner vehemently. 'The man who murdered her stole her body.'

    'Control yourself, Hugel,' said the
mayor. 'You are wild.'

    'I am in perfect control.'

    'I don't take your meaning. You are
saying that Miss Riverford's murderer broke into the morgue last night and
absconded with his victim's corpse?'

    'Precisely,' said Hugel.

    'Why?'

    'Because there is evidence on the
girl, on her body, evidence he did not want us to have.'

    'What evidence?'

    The coroner's jaws were working so
hard his temples had turned a shade of plum. 'The evidence is - it is - I am
not yet sure what it is. That is why we must get the body back!'

    'Hugel,' said the mayor, 'you have locks
on the morgue, do you not?'

    'Certainly.'

    'Good. Was the lock broken this
morning? Was there any evidence of a burglary?'

    'No,' Hugel allowed grudgingly. 'But
anyone with a decent skeleton key -'

    'Mr Coroner,' said McClellan, 'here
is what you will do: make it known to your people immediately that there will
be a fifteen-dollar reward to whoever "finds" the Riverford girl at
one of the medical schools. Twenty-five dollars if they find her today. That
will bring her back. Now: you will excuse me; I'm very busy. Good day.' As
Hugel reluctantly turned to leave, the mayor suddenly looked up from his desk.
'Wait a moment. Wait a moment. Did you say the Riverford girl was asphyxiated?'

    'Yes,' said the coroner. 'Why?'

    'How asphyxiated?'

    'By ligature.'

    'She was garroted?' asked McClellan.

    'Yes. Why?'

    The mayor ignored the coroner's
question for a second time. 'Were there any other wounds on her body?'

    'It was all in my report,' answered
the aggrieved Hugel, to whom the knowledge that the mayor had not read his
report was a fresh indignity. 'The girl was whipped. There were lacerations on
the posterior, spine, and chest. In addition, she was cut twice, by an
extremely sharp blade, at the intersection of the S-two and L-two dermatomes.'

    'Where? In English, Hugel.'

    'On the upper inner thigh of each
leg.'

    'In the name of God,' replied the
mayor.

    I went down for a late breakfast,
trying to sort out my encounter with Miss Acton. Jung was there, reading an
American newspaper. I joined him. The others had set off for the Metropolitan
Museum. Jung stayed behind, he explained, because he was going to pay a call
this morning on Dr Onuf, a neuropsychiatrist at Ellis Island.

    It was my first time alone with Jung.
He appeared to be in one of his animated, outgoing moods. He had slept all
yesterday afternoon, he said, and the long nap had done him a world of good.
Indeed, the pallor that had worried me yesterday was visibly improved. His
opinion of America, he told me, was also improving. 'Americans merely lack
literature,' he said, 'not all culture.'

    Jung meant this, I think, as a
compliment. Nevertheless, wanting to show that Americans were not entirely
illiterate, I described to him the story of the Astor Place Shakespeare riot.

    'So the Americans wanted a muscular
American Hamlet,' Jung mused, shaking his head. 'Your story confirms my point.
A masculine Hamlet is a contradiction in terms. As my great-grandfather used to
say, Hamlet represents man's feminine side: the intellectual, the inward soul,
sensitive enough to see the spiritual world but not strong enough to bear the
burden it imposes. The challenge is to do both: to hear the voices of the other
world but live in this one - to be a man of action.'

    I was puzzled by the 'voices' Jung
referred to - perhaps the unconscious? - but delighted to find he had an
opinion about Hamlet. 'You are describing Hamlet almost exactly as Goethe did,'
I said. 'That was Goethe's explanation of Hamlet's inability to act.'

    'I believe I said it was my
great-grandfather's view,' Jung replied, sipping his coffee.

    It took me a moment. 'Goethe was your
greatgrandfather?'

    'Freud prizes Goethe above all
poets,' was Jung's reply. 'Jones, by contrast, calls him a
dithyrambist.
Can you imagine? Only an Englishman. I cannot understand what Freud sees in
him.' The Jones to whom Jung referred was surely Ernest Jones, Freud's British
follower, now living in Canada and expected to join our party tomorrow. I had
concluded that Jung meant to avoid my question, but then he added, 'Yes, I am
Carl Gustav Jung the third; the first, my grandfather, was Goethe's son. It is
well known. The allegations of murder were of course ridiculous.'

    'I didn't know Goethe was accused of
murder.'

    'Goethe - certainly not,' Jung
answered indignantly. 'My grandfather. Evidently I resemble him in every way.
They arrested him for murder, but it was a pretext. He wrote a murder novel,
though,
The Suspect -
quite good - about an innocent man charged with
murder; or at least one supposes him innocent. That was before von Humboldt
took him under his protection. You know, Younger, I could almost wish your
university had not bestowed equal honors on Freud and myself. He is very
sensitive on such matters.'

    I could not well reply to this abrupt
turn in Jung's conversation. Clark was not bestowing equal honors on Freud and
Jung. As everyone knew, Freud was the centerpiece of Clark's celebration, the
keynote speaker, delivering five full lectures, while Jung was a last-minute
substitute for a panelist who had canceled.

    But Jung did not wait for an answer.
'I understand you asked Freud yesterday if he was a believer. A perceptive
question, Younger.' This was another first: Jung had not previously shown a
favorable reaction to anything I said. 'No doubt he told you he was not. He is
a genius, but his insight has endangered him. One who spends his whole life
examining the pathological, stunted, and base may lose sight of the pure, the
high, the spirit. I for one don't believe the soul is essentially carnal. Do
you?'

    'I am not sure, Dr Jung.'

    'But you are not drawn to the idea.
It is not inherently appealing to you. To them, it is.'

    I had to ask him to whom he was now
referring.

    'All of them,' Jung answered. 'Brill,
Ferenczi, Adler, Abraham, Stekel - the lot. He surrounds himself with this -
this kind. They all want to tear down whatever is high, to reduce it to
genitalia and excrement. The soul is not reducible to the body. Even Einstein,
one of their own, does not believe that God can be eliminated.'

    .'Albert Einstein?'

    'He is a frequent dinner guest at my
house,' replied Jung. 'But he too has this same inclination to reduce. He would
reduce the entire universe to mathematical laws. It is clearly a characteristic
of the Jewish mind. The Jewish male, that is. The Jewish female is simply
aggressive. Brill's wife is typical of the race. Intelligent, not unattractive,
but so very aggressive.'

    'I believe Rose is not Jewish, Dr
Jung,' I said.

    'Rose Brill?' Jung laughed. 'A woman
with that name can be of only one religion.'

    I made no reply. Jung had evidently
forgotten that Rose's name had not always been Brill.

    'The Aryan, 'Jung went on, 'is mythic
by nature. He does not try to bring everything down to man's level. Here in

    America, there is a similar tendency
to reduce, but it is different. Everything here is made for children. All is
made simple enough for children to understand: the signs, the advertisements,
everything. Even the gait with which people walk is childlike: swinging the
arms, like so. I suspect it is the result of your intermingling with the Negro.
They are a good-natured race and very religious, but so very simple- minded.
They exercise a tremendous influence on you; I notice your Southerners actually
speak with the Negro's accent. This is also the explanation of your country's
matriarchy. Woman is undoubtedly the dominant figure in America. You American
men are sheep, and your women play the ravening wolves.'

    I did not like the color in Jung's
face. At first I had deemed it an improvement; now he seemed too flushed. The
workings of his mind worried me too, for several different reasons. His
conversation was disjointed, his logic faulty, his insinuations disturbing. On
top of all this, I thought Jung considered himself remarkably well- informed
about America for someone who had been in the country two days - particularly
on the subject of American women. I changed the subject, informing him that I
had just completed my first session with Miss Acton.

    Jung's voice went cold. 'What?'

    'She has taken rooms upstairs.'

    'You are analyzing the girl - you,
here, in the hotel?'

    'Yes, Dr Jung.'

    'I see.' He wished me luck, not very
convincingly, and rose to leave. I asked him to convey my regards to Dr Onuf.
For a moment, he looked as if I were speaking jibberish. Then he said he would
be happy to oblige me.