Читать книгу Silent Screams - C.E. Lawrence - Страница 18

Lee sat off to the side in the drafty lecture hall at John Jay College, watching his old mentor in action. It was after 3 P.M., but the heat wasn’t on in the cavernous room, and the students sat bundled in their down jackets, rubbing their hands and blowing on them. In spite of the chill, though, attendance was good. Nelson’s lectures always drew a crowd. This was a new course, something a bit daring for the typical John Jay curriculum: The Psychology and Philosophy of the Serial Offender.

Up on the stage, Nelson paced in front of the podium, hands jammed into his pants pockets. He lectured without notes, and the machine-gun delivery of his lectures had often been parodied by his students. When Lee was a senior at John Jay, the class sketch show included a satire of Nelson, played by a student in a red fright wig, chain-smoking several cigarettes at once and barking out his lectures so fast that they were unintelligible. To his credit, Nelson laughed himself silly over it. He later said it was the most flattering portrayal he had ever seen of himself.

“I want to continue today with a quote from the renowned FBI profiler John Douglas,” Nelson said, stopping his pacing to pull down a large projection screen at the front of the room. “In his book, Mindhunter, he writes, ‘To understand the artist, look at his work.’”

Nelson perched on the edge of his desk and rubbed the back of his neck. “Now, what exactly does this mean?”

He looked out over the sea of eager faces. “It’s been said that there is a fine line between genius and madness. If you carry that idea far enough, you might even surmise that beneath every genius lurks a potential madman. And certainly in cases like van Gogh or Lord Byron, you had both. Trying to separate a genius from his ‘madness’ is like trying to pull dye out of a fabric after it has set. It’s a chicken-and-egg question. Who’s to say which feeds which? Would van Gogh have painted sunflowers or the garden at Arles if he didn’t suffer from bipolar disorder? My guess is probably not. He may have painted—he may even have painted well—but he would not have been van Gogh.”

He paused to adjust the slide projector on the desk next to him. The students sat, captured by his intellect and charisma. Lee remembered that when he was a student, there were girls who had crushes on Nelson, following him around between classes, soaking in the heat of his forceful personality.

“So that takes us back to John Douglas,” Nelson said, rising from his perch on the desk and picking up a remote control for the slide projector. “‘To understand the artist, look at his work.’ And if you view a serial offender the same way you would look at an artist, then we can begin to understand what Mr. Douglas is saying. After all, the root for both is the same: obsession. It’s only the form and content that differs, the degree of sublimation, of social acceptability.”

“Now this,” he said, clicking his remote control so that a picture of the garden at Arles appeared on the screen, “is socially acceptable. But this”—another click and it was replaced by a photograph of a young woman with dark red strangulation marks around her neck—” is not.”

There were murmurs from his audience. Nelson’s lips twitched, and one side of his mouth curved upward in a smile. He liked shocking his students. Without this dark side, Lee thought, Nelson would not be Nelson.

A girl in the third row raised her hand. She was a thin blonde, with a pale, waifish face.

“Are you implying that there’s no difference between a serial predator and a great artist?” Her voice quavered, though Lee couldn’t tell if it was from nerves or anger.

“Not at all,” Nelson replied. “I merely suggest that what drives them springs from the same source. The form of expression couldn’t be more different.”

The girl’s pale face reddened, and her voice shook even more. “So it’s just a question of form?”

“But form is content, on some very profound level. Consider the irreducibility of a poem, for example. It’s like the artificial separation between mind and body, something eastern medicine has recognized for centuries. Is a migraine headache a product of too much red wine, a genetic predisposition, or a fight with one’s husband? Who’s to say? The doctor says it’s the result of an expanded blood vessel in the forehead, the allergist claims it’s an aversion to tannins and nitrate, the reiki healer claims it’s an imbalance of the energies—and maybe they’re all right.”

He settled himself on the front of the desk again, his arms crossed.

“As to the difference between an artist and a criminal, I would maintain that van Gogh, who was actually psychotic, was lucky to have found an expression for his spirit, for his demons, that was socially acceptable. Or take Beethoven, for example, who was a famously eccentric and tortured soul. They were better adapters than your average criminal. On the other hand, there are people who are both criminals and talented creative artists—like the playwright Jean Genet, for example.”

A boy in the second row raised his hand. “You said they spring from the same source—what’s the source?”

“Libido—the life force. Passion. Without passion, there is no creativity—or destruction. Passion in Greek means ‘to suffer,’ as in the passion of Christ. But in our culture it has come to mean the force that drives sex, not creativity. I might remind you,” he continued, “that Adolf Hitler was an aspiring artist before he became a dictator.

“In fact, it’s been argued that had the art critics of Vienna been kinder to young Adolf, World War II might have been avoided. It was partly his frustration as an artist that turned him toward politics. As R. D. Laing points out, it is necessary for a person to feel they have made a difference—that they are being ‘received’ by others. So the ignored artist becomes the politician, and he ensures that he is listened to. Both his art and his political speeches were his attempts to impose his will—his self—upon the world. Like all cult leaders, he preys on his followers’ fears and dreams—”

A dark-haired girl in the front row raised her hand. “The Nazis were a cult?”

Nelson cocked his head to one side. “Of course they were a cult—a very successful one, for a while. All cults eventually self-destruct, of course. But that’s another topic.”

Nelson stood up from his perch on the front of the desk and pulled himself up to his full height of five foot six inches. “The ignored artist, or son, or lover, can also become a serial offender.” He clicked the remote in his hand and the slide of the young woman was replaced by a close-up of a smiling Ted Bundy.

“Most of you recognize this man. Handsome, intelligent, and charming, he was the sort of man your mother might wish you would marry.” Lee wasn’t sure, but he thought Nelson glanced at the blond girl when he said this. “But he was the very icon of the creature society fears most—the monster in its midst. And some deeply antisocial personalities, like Bundy, learn to imitate social behavior very, very well—you might even say they are masquerading as human beings.”

Nelson put down the remote and stood facing his audience.

“But he was a human being, and our job is to understand him, not merely judge him. It is a profoundly more difficult and disturbing task, of course, but it is the one we have chosen.”

A thin boy in the back raised his hand. “Would you say that Ted Bundy was evil?”

“That’s just a label—irrelevant, for our purposes. Leave it to the professional philosophers and theologians. The profiler and psychologist have no need to answer that question.”

The boy sat up in his seat. Lee couldn’t see his face, but he was slight and blond, and had a thin, raspy voice. “So do you believe there is such a thing as evil in the world?”

Nelson ran a hand through his wavy auburn hair. “The most profound questions are the very ones we should never assume to answer conclusively. Learning to live in a state of uncertainty is one of the most difficult tasks we have as human beings, but one of the most important. As soon as we feel we have all the answers, something inside us begins to die. But that’s for another lecture,” he added, glancing at his watch. “Any more questions?”

The thin blond boy raised his hand again.

“Freud said that if the id is left unchecked, it can run wild.”

Nelson flipped off the power switch to the slide projector. “The word for what we call the ‘id,’ by the way, in its original German, is ‘das Es’—the It. A much bolder statement, I think, than the flaccid Latin word. Compare ‘ego’ with the Ich, the I. And Germans, as you may or may not know, capitalize all of their pronouns.”

The blond girl raised her hand. “Their nouns, actually.”

Nelson smiled. “Thank you for that correction, Ms. Davenport. Okay, everyone, see you all next week.”

Lee smiled too—he wasn’t sure if she was one of Nelson’s admirers or not. As she gathered up her books and placed them in her knapsack, he thought she was sending lingering glances in Nelson’s direction, though, and she was the last to leave the lecture hall. When the room was empty Nelson sauntered up the steps to where Lee sat in the back row.

“Well, well, just like old times. Drop in for a refresher course?”

Lee smiled. “Something like that.”

“How about a drink? I’m buying. I need to wash the taste of undergraduate minds from my mouth.”

“Sure, why not? As long as you’re buying.”

The bar at Armstrong’s was one of Nelson’s favorite watering holes on Tenth Avenue. The menu was capricious and varied—and, more importantly to Nelson, the draft pints of Bass were reliable and cheap. Armstrong’s was one of Hell’s Kitchen’s best-kept secrets, known to locals but not to tourists, or to the bridge-and-tunnel crowd that swept down Ninth Avenue during rush hour.

“That was quite a far-ranging lecture,” Lee remarked as the bartender set a pair of dripping amber pints in front of them.

“Mostly these days I just try to keep myself amused,” Nelson replied, drinking deeply from the sweating glass. He wiped his upper lip and plunked the glass down on the bar. “Now that is what A. E. Housman was talking about when he said, ‘Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man.’”

“Still, we need our Milton as well as our malt.”

Nelson dipped a hand into the bowl of fresh popcorn sitting on the bar. “True. It’s funny, but I still remember reading Paradise Lost in school and thinking how interesting Satan was—and how boring Christ was.”

“Satan is more human,” Lee agreed. “He’s conflicted, whereas Christ has everything figured out. Who can identify with that?”

“Or maybe we just like our villains,” Nelson replied with a smile. He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in the other direction. It smelled sharp and aromatic, like herbs.

“Clove cigarettes,” he replied in answer to Lee’s look. “Some of my students smoke them. Supposedly they’re better for you.”

“I don’t think Christ’s virtue is what makes him so opaque,” Lee remarked. “It’s his certainty. But even virtuous people are full of doubts and uncertainty. That’s what we relate to about Satan: he’s in pain, his soul is in torment. Christ is just so damn serene! Who can identify with that?”

“Not me, my lad, not me,” Nelson answered with a wave to the bartender. “Another for me, my good man. You’ll have to catch up,” he added, seeing Lee’s half-full glass.

Lee was concerned over the pace of his friend’s drinking. Nelson evidently picked up on this, because he laid a hand on Lee’s arm.

“Don’t worry, lad, I don’t have any more lectures today. I’ve never yet turned up to class under the influence, and I don’t plan to start now. So how’s your case coming?”

“We’ve got a suspect, but I don’t think he’s the man.”

Lee told Nelson about Father Michael and his relationship with the dead girl. Nelson listened intently, his eyes narrowed.

“He clammed up as soon as his lawyer arrived?”

“Yeah. His lawyer kept saying it was the girl’s word against his, and that we had no crime to charge him with.”

Nelson sighed. “He’s right, of course. You may be right that this priest isn’t the killer, but you should keep an eye on him.”

“We are.”

“Good. Now, how about one more round?”

“No, thanks,” Lee replied, feeling uncomfortable. “I can’t drink quite as much as I used to.”

“Keep such admissions to yourself, or they’ll have you thrown out of this place!” Nelson said loudly enough that the bartender could hear.

He clearly did not want to discuss his drinking, and the force of his personality was like a wall between them. Lee was partly relieved. He had no desire to turn the tables on their tenuous father-son relationship. He was pretty certain his friend’s drinking had accelerated since his wife’s death, but the thought of confronting Nelson about it was daunting. He vowed to keep an eye on his friend, but babysitting Nelson’s drinking would have to take a backseat to finding the man who was stalking and strangling young women.

He looked at the happy, relaxed faces all around him: the young Latino couple in the corner, the pair of students at the other end of the bar, the young mother with her son at the video game machine. He felt an irrational sense of responsibility to protect them all from a killer who—Lee was certain—would not stop until he was caught.