Carthage (27 page)

The Intern was too surprised to be disturbed, or offended. The Intern had to marvel.

“How did you do it, Dr. Hinton? I had n-no idea . . .”

“Of course you had ‘no idea.’ That is the point of the mini-camera.”

The Investigator laughed, as if the Intern had uttered a very naïve remark.

He explained: deftly and inconspicuously he’d snapped these pictures during their conversation with a Sony mini-camera hidden in his watch, that operated with a tiny battery charged like a cell phone.

The Investigator showed her how it was done. The Investigator reminded her how he’d engaged her fullest attention as he’d spoken with her, distracting it from his wristwatch.

The Investigator smiled with a corner of his mouth. Clearly, the Investigator was pleased with himself.

“The mini-camera-watch is a new purchase. I’m still experimenting with it. I’ve used pen-cameras, which are also good. None of these produce as sharp images as, for instance, a not-extraordinary cell phone. It does take skill. It takes practice. It takes
sangfroid—chutzpah
. As my intern you must possess both, while seeming to possess neither.” The Investigator paused. He could not have known—(could he?)—that no one had addressed the Intern in such a tone, at once so intimate and so aggressive, in a very long time; and that the very sound of his voice left her mildly shaken.

She did not speak of course. She knew as much of
sangfroid
as she did of
chutzpah
—from reading, and not from experience. But she did not speak. The Investigator continued:

“In the world of high-tech surveillance espionage for instance, these aren’t very sophisticated tools, but my subjects don’t seem to have caught on just yet. And of course, Professor Cornelius Hinton is
so unassuming
.”

The Investigator laughed, out of pride at his own cleverness.

The Intern marveled at the watch, and the tiny camera contained within the watch. The Intern despaired that she would ever master such a delicate operation, under the gaze of a subject.

“My fingers are too clumsy, Dr. Hinton. I could never do that—what you did. I’d get caught, I—”

“You will not ‘get caught.’ You will take mini-pictures as well as I do, eventually better. You will begin. Here.”

The Investigator gave the Intern her first Sony mini-camera, a feminized version of his big-faced digital watch, to slip onto her slender wrist.

Her eyes filled with tears. So beautiful!

That was eight months ago. Since then, the Intern had come to know the Investigator intimately.

Not
inwardly
—but intimately.

To know, for instance, that when the Investigator worked at his computer, transcribing scribbled notes from his tiny notebook into a file as he did obsessively, hour following hour, day following day—he listened to Mozart.

Mozart piano sonatas, primarily.

The simplicity of an early sonata—Sonata no. 15 in F Major.

The more powerful C Major Sonata, K. 330, played by Horowitz.

Out of the computer these notes swelled in a fluid cascade. Utter clarity. Perfection.

Working nearby in the Investigator’s office, involved in more mundane secretarial tasks, the Intern would find herself listening entranced. The Investigator’s prose was often raw, rough-textured in indignation—the
savage indignation
of Jonathan Swift, as he described it—but his ideal was classic clarity.

“Nothing truly matters but social justice,” the Investigator said. “Even to know that we can make very little headway against injustice, still—” His voice quavered, the challenge was thrilling to him.

The Intern wondered if the “personal life” had failed the Investigator—he’d been hurt, he’d been crippled, or had hurt others, crippled and disappointed others, who could not shape their (personal) lives to an (impersonal) life of service. The Intern wondered but would not ever have asked.

Long ago the Intern had played Mozart. The early piano pieces, composed by the child-Mozart. She smiled to recall—but no, she could not recall.

That little kick in the heart—the thrill of memory! No.

All that was
back there
was closed to her now. They had cast her away in shame and derision. She was the
ugly one,
unloved.

Almost, she could recall her (near-naked) body covered in muck, excrement. Her hair, her eyes. They’d laughed in derision.

Ugly ugly ugly. There’s the ugly one.

Her family she had shamed. Their name, debased. She could not bear to think of it and so she did not, she had not and would not
ever.

Except: listening to the piano notes of Mozart lifting out of the Investigator’s computer, she was compelled to recall.

Listening entranced, staring at the back of the Investigator’s head—airy-white hair, grown just slightly long over his collar—the intelligent cast to his head, as if cocked, to hear more accurately, what another, more coarse-eared, could not hear.

At such times feeling that her soul had been vaporized. Sucked from her. The crystalline piano notes, the clarity and beauty and the ease that was without haste or urgency, and in a way anonymous—as if the composer-Mozart were not an individual, a mere man, mortal, who had died centuries ago, but the voice of humankind itself, refined of all that is crude, gross, debased and ugly.

“McSwain!”—the Investigator was calling to her. (Often now omitting the honorific
Ms
. because
McSwain
was so much more efficient and so much more suited to the occasion.)

“Yes, sir?”

“Not busy, are you?”

“I—n-no . . .”

Of course, the Intern was busy. The Investigator had many times more work for the Intern to do than she could possibly do in a single day.

Between interns, the Investigator had “fallen behind”—it seemed.

There were ordinary household and office bills to be paid—gas, electric, taxes. There were royalty checks to be sent to the bank(s) in which the Investigator had his account(s). There were bank statements to be recorded, there were IRS documents to be filled out and sent to the Investigator’s accountant in Fort Lauderdale. More mysteriously, there were checks—some of them monthly—to be made out to numerous individuals and services. Above all there were files—manila folders stuffed with notes, documents, newspaper articles, email printouts—to which the Intern had been assigned.

“Will you get me some tea? Green tea. A large mug. And some honey. And for yourself, if you wish. Please.”

The Investigator’s natural mode of communication was giving orders to others—matter-of-fact, just slightly bossy. He’d been a PI—“principal investigator”—in experimental psychology laboratories at the Institute and at previous universities where his role had been to give orders to younger assistants, post-docs, graduate and undergraduate students.

But there was the
please,
that mitigated.

“Yes, sir.”

SOON THEN THE INTERN KNEW
more of the Investigator than the Investigator could have guessed she might know.

She knew his name(s). His birth name, his early professional name, the “Investigator”-name(s) under which he published. And his bank-account name(s).

Not only could the Intern forge the Investigator’s signature(s), it was her task, as the Investigator bid her, to forge these signatures when he was too busy to be interrupted for such mundane tasks.

“The only thing we can’t ‘forge’ is a legal document. For that, we need witnesses and a notary public.”

Here was a surprise: for all that the Investigator was famously secretive and reclusive, “impossible to interview”—(as the author of the
Shame
!
series was described on the Internet, for instance)—contacting even his distinguished New York City and London publishers and his agents through a maze of fictitious email identities, he was astonishingly casual with the Intern once he’d determined that he could trust her.

He’d seemed to know, by the set of the Intern’s impassive little face in which her eyes appeared large and stark and shrewd and yet uncertain, that she was guileless as she appeared, and could have no motive for betrayal. And perhaps he took for granted that, like previous young female interns in his employ, she adored
him.

The Intern was not one to
adore
. Not for a very long time.

Neither would have acted upon this adoration. It was just
there—
like a talisman dangling about the Intern’s neck which you could choose to see or not-see.

The Intern had been surprised to learn that the Investigator, born
Andrew Edgar Mackie Jr.
in St. Paul, Minnesota, on March 1, 1938, had been a seminarian at the Jesuit seminary at Rockland, Minnesota, from 1958 to 1959; he’d dropped out of the seminary to attend the University of Minnesota, from which he graduated in 1963 with a B.A. in psychology and anthropology. Ever afterward the Investigator was known to say that he’d never abandoned the Jesuit imperative—
Love God, and do what you will.

God
he interpreted as the “most exalted” of all human projects—as the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach had believed. Human will, human love, human hope, human desire—a gigantic image projected upon a screen, a sky-screen of blue opacity.

The Intern supposed that this must be so. She had no religious beliefs of her own.

The Investigator had been a scornful unbeliever—a “militant atheist”—after he’d left the seminary and the Roman Catholic Church; now, decades later, he was still contemptuous of religious institutions, but sympathetic with individuals for whom religious faith was a necessity of life.

The Investigator had abandoned the Midwestern
Andrew Edgar Mackie Jr.
sometime in the 1960s.

Soon then, there appeared
Cornelius Hinton
, with advanced degrees from Harvard, Cambridge University, and Columbia University.

Hinton
was an energetic and seemingly ambitious academician. His fields were semantics, social psychology, cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind—the least penetrable of disciplines. In the 1970s
Hinton
began to be published widely in academic journals and to be offered professorships at distinguished universities—Columbia, Duke, Yale, Cornell. He moved about as a visiting professor. As a visiting fellow at research institutes. He had no interest in academic rank or in tenure—often, he stayed at a university for only a single semester. He lived in the (rented) homes and apartments of professors on leave. In Ithaca he’d lived much of the time at a campsite in Lebanon State Park a half-hour’s drive from the Cornell campus. He wore his hair long. He ceased shaving. He leased cars, when necessary. He preferred bicycles even in cold weather which, in upstate New York, can be very cold, blustery and snowy indeed.

In 1991 he accepted a fellowship at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia. Soon after that, a permanent and high-paying position at the Institute for Advanced Research at Florida State University–Temple Park where multi-millionaire Fort Lauderdale donors were hoping to establish a world-class research institution. Yet, strangely,
Cornelius Hinton
seemed to have ceased publishing at about the time he arrived in Temple Park.

The Investigator’s first, controversial bestseller in what would be the
SHAME!
series had actually been published in 1979: this was
SHAME! ARCADIA HALL 1977–78
, a vividly narrated undercover account of the largest state-run home for mentally ill adolescents in Pennsylvania, Arcadia Hall in Philadelphia. This was a psychiatric medical facility in which attendants routinely harassed, beat, and sexually abused their charges while medical staffers and administrators ignored complaints until serious injuries and a death occurred.
SHAME! ARCADIA HALL 1977–78
was presented in diary form by the Investigator who remained anonymous within its pages; according to the book cover, the author was “J. Swift”—the Investigator’s homage to his great predecessor Jonathan Swift. From a brief biographical note on the book’s dust jacket you learned little of “J. Swift” except that he’d been born in the Midwest “at the end of the Great Depression” and had “traveled widely, and deeply, within U.S. borders”; there was no jacket photo. From the diarist account itself you surmised that “the Investigator” was an impassioned individual who had once intended to become a Jesuit but who’d dropped out of the seminary to become involved in the civil rights movement. Preparing to write
SHAME! ARCADIA HALL
1977–78
the Investigator had trained as a medical attendant at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing; he’d worked twelve-hour days for nine increasingly stressful months at Arcadia Hall, recording and photographing his experiences, until he was fired for “insubordination”—trying to intervene between patients and fellow attendants.

It was a part of the controversy of
SHAME! ARCADIA HALL
1977–78
that the author had been beaten, injured, and hospitalized himself; his assailants had eventually been arrested, tried and found guilty of criminal assault and battery. His life had been threatened numerous times but by the time
SHAME! ARCADIA HALL
1977–78
was published, and climbing bestseller charts following a sensational front-page review in the
New York Times Book Review
by the distinguished psychiatrist and Harvard professor Robert Coles, the mysterious “J. Swift” had disappeared from Philadelphia with no plans to return.