Fatal Lies by Frank Tallis (novels in english txt) 📗

general evasiveness; however, his facial expressions were becoming increasingly provocative. An ugly smirk occasionally disturbed the neutrality of his thin mouth, and his declarations of ignorance were delivered in a tone rich with sarcasm. It was an accomplished performance, in which tacit mockery never quite amounted to insult—but came very close.

The boys who were still waiting in the next room had been getting progressively louder. Rheinhardt could hear squeals of delight, the sound of scraping chairs, and running. They seemed to be playing a game of some kind. Strange, thought Rheinhardt, that those same young men (who only an hour before had been smoking and playing cards like hardened campaigners) were now enjoying the infantile pleasures of tag. Such was the peculiarity of their age.

Wolf raised his hand to his mouth as if politely covering a yawn— but his steady gaze and relaxed neck muscles showed that the gesture was pure artifice.

“Are you tired?” asked Rheinhardt.

“Yes,” Wolf replied, without inflection. “We were practicing drill—at sunrise.”

The boy smiled.

Rheinhardt watched the bloodless lips curl, and, as they twisted, he observed in their convolution, in their counterfeit charm, something unsettling.

Policeman's intuition…

He had trusted his instincts before, and he must trust them again.

This was not an ordinary smile. This was a cruel smile, a malignant smile. This was the smile of a sadist.

“You tortured Zelenka, didn't you?” said Rheinhardt softly. “You and your friends. You held that poor boy down, and you cut him.”

A peal of good-humored laughter sounded through the walls.

Wolf's smile did not vanish—if anything, it intensified.

“That is a very serious allegation,” he said calmly.

“I know,” said Rheinhardt.

“The kind of allegation,” Wolf continued, “that one should make only when one has sufficient evidence. And I know for a fact, Inspector, that you have nothing of the kind.”

Rheinhardt was unnerved by the boy's confidence. By his steady, silky delivery.

“My uncle,” added Wolf, “will be most aggrieved when he hears about your conduct.”

“Your uncle?”

“Yes. My uncle Manfred.”

“What has your uncle got to do with this?”

“A great deal.” Wolf's lips parted, showing his even teeth. “He is not only my uncle but your superior. He runs the security office: He is Commissioner Manfred Brügel.”

30

LIEBERMANN SAT, HIS CLENCHED FIST against his cheek, his forefinger extended, tapping his temple, while the old jurist again discoursed at length on the principle of plurality as revealed to him by the angelic being from Phobos. But the young doctor was not really listening. His mind was wholly occupied by the events of the preceding evening. A monochrome re-creation of Miss Lyd gate repeatedly surrendering herself to the mysterious stranger's embrace flickered in his head like the moving images of a kinetoscope. This harrowing, cruel coup de théâtre was accompanied by an interminable torrent of inner speech: Why didn't she tell me about him? Why should she? She was not obliged to tell you anything! Her private life is no concern of yours.… But she must have known that I… that I… You were indecisive—you dithered and procrastinated. Unforgivable. And so it continued throughout the morning—an endless stream of questions, remorse, and self-recrimination.

After the old jurist, Liebermann saw a young woman with a pathological fear of spiders, a civil servant who derived pleasure from dressing in his wife's clothing, and an utterly miserable “comic” actor. The peculiar and ironic condition of the latter would ordinarily have piqued his interest, but Liebermann was completely unable to focus on what the man was saying. Eventually, the young doctor was forced to concede defeat. There was no point in proceeding—he was in no fit state to practice. He fabricated an excuse that would account for his absence, and retired to a nondescript coffeehouse located behind the hospital.

On entering the establishment, he felt somewhat ashamed of his white lie—particularly so on observing that all the other patrons were absconding medical students trying to recover after a night of excessive drinking.

Liebermann stirred his schwarzer and sank into a state of ruminative abstraction. In the play of light on the surface of his coffee he saw—once again—a trembling suggestion of Miss Lyd gate falling into the arms of her lover.

Although the notion was unjustified, Liebermann could not rid himself of the feeling that he had been deceived, and the longer he sat, ordering schwarzers, smoking Trabuco cheroots, and thinking, thinking, thinking, the less unreasonable his position seemed. Miss Lyd gate had given him the impression that she was a bookish intellectual: refined, elevated, untroubled by baser instincts, with little or no interest in gentlemen. The young doctor tapped his cigar, and a long cylinder of fragile ash dropped onto the tabletop, creating a star-burst of white ash. How could he, the most astute judge of character, have been so wrong! (Like all psychiatrists, he had immense difficulty grasping the fundamental truth that self-understanding is considerably more problematic than understanding others.)

A dark thought, like a black storm cloud, rolled over the flat horizon of his consciousness. Miss Lyd gate had once suffered from hysteria… and he had treated her. He remembered something that Professor Gruner, the former head of department, had said to him— a warning that he had instantly dismissed: As we all know, the female hysteric is cunning, malicious, and histrionic. She is a consummate seductress. The credulous physician is easy prey.

At the time, Liebermann had considered Gruner an old fool: unsympathetic, misogynistic, and an advocate of barbaric electrical treatments. Yet now, as Liebermann sank deeper and deeper into a quagmire of unhappy, bitter confusion, he found himself reviewing his opinion.

“No,” he said, quite suddenly—surprised and embarrassed to discover that he had spoken the word aloud. An unshaven medical student sitting at the next table raised his head and looked around the room with bleary bloodshot eyes.

I cannot blame her! I cannot think this way!

Annoyed at his own weakness, annoyed at his willingness to entertain a pernicious, morally bankrupt account of hysterical illness, annoyed at the ease with which he had condemned Miss Lyd gate (just like the patriarchal women-hating psychiatrists he