It was not possible. “Did she say why?”
“She did not need to.”
“I would feel more comfortable if I might hear these sentiments directly from her,” I insisted.
“Your comfort is not my concern. And now, I must bid you good day. Rebecca Lachtmann’s funeral is this afternoon and I have a number of matters that must be addressed before then.” I wondered if Albert would be going to the funeral as well. “By the way,” he added, “I would strongly advise against your trying to attend.”
A moment later, I found myself standing in the street, the Benedicts’ door closed behind me. It had shut with a resonant bang that had a finality about it—I was not being dismissed from a home, but from a way of life.
I needed to see Abigail, to explain, to have her tell me that she would not stand for such blatant disregard for her feelings. She would demand that her father relent. I would see her that evening, after Rebecca’s funeral. Perhaps I would arrive and insist on paying my condolences, or perhaps I would simply wait outside in the street until she appeared. I was not sure how, but I would find a way.
I had scant time to dwell on the issue, however, and as I left for my next stop, the cable office, I saw that the morning had yielded a second unpleasant surprise. I had apparently inherited Keuhn. The Pinkerton man was waiting across the street, at the edge of Rittenhouse Square, making little effort at concealment. His presence was so obvious that it was clearly less to discern my movements than to remind me that Jonas Lachtmann was always close, holding me to my promise of identifying Turk’s accomplice.
As I went to check on my inquiry at the cable company, Keuhn stood directly across the street from the front door. The eager young man was not working that morning and I was left to deal with a more typical clerical type—mid-thirties, bored, and surly. But my reply had indeed arrived. As I thanked the clerk and paid for the wire, a woman walked in and, in a heavy accent, greeted Mr. Schultz.
“Schultz?” I asked. “Does either of you speak German?”
The woman did. I showed her the cable, which was quite brief, and asked if she could translate.
“Ja,” she said. “Maybe.” She looked over it a few moments. “It say they not doing any … uh …” She was hung up on one word. “Tries?”
“Experiments?” I asked.
“Ja,” the woman replied. “Must be … speriments. They not doing any speriments on anything like you say.”
“Thank you,” I said.
When I emerged and took the streetcar to the hospital, Keuhn jumped on at the last minute. He dallied in the lobby as I made my way to the changing room, and he was down the corridor when I emerged five minutes later. Any time I chose, I could go through the laboratory and use the service stairs, from which I might walk out the back of the hospital and leave West Philadelphia by way of the Blockley. Attempting to shake Keuhn off, however, would be tantamount to admitting to Lachtmann that I had something further to hide. For the moment, it seemed, I was stuck with the Pinkerton man as a companion.
As I walked down the corridor in his direction, he smiled and backed around the corner. I was wondering if he would be in sight when I got to the turn, so I was fully unprepared to run face-to-face into the Professor. When he saw that it was I, he frowned in a manner that would ordinarily be reserved for a student who had misdiagnosed an encephalitic tumor.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he said tersely. “I want you to call on me this evening at my lodgings. Seven o’clock.”
He could not have chosen a worse possible night. It was imperative that I see Abigail as soon as possible. “I’m sorry, Dr. Osler,” I said, “but I’ve got a very important engagement this evening.”
“Cancel it,” he snarled and stalked away. I was left standing in the corridor, my hands hanging at my sides, Keuhn at one end, the Professor marching off down the other. Lachtmann had not kept his word. The truth was out and I was done for.
The Professor’s rooms were on Twelfth Street, north of downtown, two floors of a fashionable town house in a better section of the city, but removed from Millionaire’s Row. Like every other aspect of the Professor’s fortunes, his living standards were soon to be vastly enhanced. I had learned during our weekend that Gilman had arranged for him to reside in a large, extremely well-appointed town house in Baltimore.
I arrived precisely on time. Widows were the servants of choice for bachelors and, like my arrangement with Mrs. Mooney, the Professor engaged Mrs. Barlow to cook his meals and tend to his domestic needs. She opened the door and smiled when she saw me. Mrs. Barlow was an open-faced woman with six grown children. She was almost shapeless, but utterly unflappable, as if there were not a single of life’s crises or calamities that she had not witnessed or was without a plan to manage. With total aplomb, she removed vials filled with tissue samples that the Professor had deposited absent-mindedly in his coat, or answered the front door for four A.M. emergencies as if she had been awake for hours. I had been a guest here often and Mrs. Barlow had taken to doting on me, attentions that I accepted with a combination of embarrassment and gratitude.
“Come on in, Doctor,” she said in a soft brogue. “The Professor is waiting in the drawing room. You know the way.” Mrs. Barlow was the only person I knew other than myself who referred to Dr. Osler as “the Professor.”
She turned for the kitchen, leaving me to make my own way. As I trudged toward the drawing room, I heard a soft hum of voices. Who had the Professor invited to share the occasion of my dismissal? Was it Gilman himself, or Billings, or even Welch, up from Baltimore to make things official? I turned into the room and saw that it was none of those men.
It was Halsted.
He rose as I entered, dressed as before in a perfectly cut dark suit, with a brilliantly white shirt and collar, pearl cuff links, and dark cravat. A silver-framed pince-nez rested on the bridge of his nose.
He offered his hand, and I realized that, at Hopkins, I had failed to notice the lines around his eyes and tinge to the skin. I had learned during the visit to Hopkins that Halsted was only thirty-seven, three years younger than the Professor, but he appeared at least ten years older. The cause of the disparity between appearance and reality was not difficult to deduce.
We shook hands, Halsted with that same strong and confident grip, and he said, “Thank you for coming, Dr. Carroll. I was hoping to have the opportunity of speaking with you. The last occasion was hardly conducive.” There was still a rigidity to the man, which in Baltimore I had attributed to coldness, but which now seemed to stem more from a need for self-control.
I told Dr. Halsted stiffly that I was pleased to see him again as well, trying once more to read something in his eyes.
The Professor stepped forward and placed his hand upon my shoulder, an odd show of amity after his icy behavior in the hospital. It left me completely unsure of my ground. Might I be reprieved after all, or simply slaughtered more amiably?
“I thought, Ephraim,” he said, “that you should meet the man whose life you are about to destroy.”
“But I was not … never …” I stammered.
“Oh, come now, Ephraim,” said the Professor. “You are not the only person capable of building a theory from incongruent bits of data. We are physicians, after all. We use logical extension every day in moving from symptom to diagnosis. It was not all that difficult to work backward from your activities to the motivation that prompted them. Quite evidently, your theory, which you were attempting to prove by surreptitious visits to the medical library, dens of iniquity and, finally, a cemetery—Oh, yes, we are aware of that—was that Dr. Halsted was complicit in the death of Rebecca Lachtmann and quite possibly responsible for Turk’s murder.” He smiled. “You were also trying to figure out whether I was involved too, eh?”
“No, Dr. Osler,” I protested, feeling my shirt stick to my back despite the chill in the room. “I was not trying to prove a theory … only to find out if it was true. And I prayed every minute that it was not.�
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“It was not,” said Halsted, with finality. The eyes behind the thick lenses never wavered.
“The poor girl was finally given a proper interment today,” said the Professor. “It was in the afternoon papers. It was a private affair. I don’t know how the family is going to be able to maintain that she died abroad, though, if they expect to eventually bring someone to trial for her murder.”
I did not comment, although I believed Jonas Lachtmann had little intention of putting his faith in the judicial system.
“In any event, Ephraim,” the Professor went on, “I am afraid you have evaluated the symptoms and come to a faulty diagnosis, but given the circumstances, neither I nor Halsted here can take you too much to task. In fact, in any other context, your behavior would have been quite praiseworthy. You showed yourself to be a dogged and clever investigator and your conclusions were actually quite reasonable. We can only hope that you will continue to bring similar zeal to your duties as a physician.”
“Dr. Carroll,” Halsted said evenly, “I had nothing at all to do with Rebecca Lachtmann’s death and certainly nothing to do with poisoning George Turk, although I will say in candor that I am not the least bit sorry that he is dead.” The dispassion of Halsted’s delivery made the denial itself more persuasive. “The man was evil, a parasite. He preyed on the misfortune of others to line his pockets. I have heard tell that Turk’s activities may be excused because of the deprivations he experienced when he was a youth, but I can think of no justification for performing abortions or selling morphia to those who could not live without it.”
“Activities, by the way, Ephraim,” added the Professor, “of which I knew nothing until just before his death.”
“As a result of all this innuendo and confusion, Dr. Carroll,” Halsted went on, “Dr. Osler thought that you should hear the truth from us … from me … particularly since we will be working together.”
Working together? For a moment, I doubted my hearing. “Thank you, Dr. Halsted,” I said. “I would like that very much. I am mortified at having misjudged you.”
Halsted nodded perfunctorily, but his expression did not change. Still, he seemed much more to fear the rejection of others than to be rejecting others himself.
“Let’s sit and have some wine,” said the Professor, “and afterward, if you still wish to remain in our company, Ephraim, Mrs. Barlow can make us some dinner.”
I took a seat as the Professor poured two glasses of claret, one for me and the other for himself. I had arrived expecting to be eviscerated and instead I was apparently being … courted. I glanced to where Halsted was seated and saw a cup of tea on the side table next to his chair. After each of us took a sip of our respective beverages, Halsted replaced his cup on in its saucer and began.
“Let us first dispense with the obvious. My addiction to drugs is not to be denied, either in the past or, unfortunately, in the present. It is why, to answer your unspoken query, I do not take alcohol. I have learned that it is far too easy to substitute one dependency for another. But before you judge me, Doctor, allow me to enlighten you as to the genesis and history of my condition.”
I had heard of Halsted’s coca experiments before, but never from the man himself.
“As I believe you know,” he began, “I came late to medicine, during my final year at Yale. I had been an uninspired student before but medicine fascinated me such that I graduated first in my class from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City.” Even reciting the story of his own life, Halsted seemed personally removed, as if he were listing a set of symptoms. “I was accepted on the staff of Bellevue Hospital and my interest turned from general medicine to surgery. Although Lister’s advocacy of asepsis had converted a small percentage of the staff, most of the surgeons continued to perform operations under filthy conditions, wearing street clothes and handling instruments with unwashed hands. One or two even smoked cigars as they cut.
“I was convinced that hygienic surgery would vastly reduce infection, and I became somewhat fanatical on the subject. Many of my colleagues grew more than a bit annoyed, being lectured to by someone no older than you are now, Dr. Carroll, but subsequent events have more than justified my behavior. Still, I was forced to move on to New York Hospital, which had a more enlightened view of scientific advance, and, I daresay, I began to build a sterling reputation as a surgeon and a researcher.” Halsted’s tone still did not waver, and there was not the slightest degree of braggadocio in his words.
“It was at New York Hospital that I met Welch. He was just my age, a brilliant pathologist, and was, at the time, teaching the first pathology course in the United States. He had converted an old morgue near the East River into a laboratory. We each saw instantly that surgery and pathology formed a symbiosis and we became both professionally inseparable and intimate friends. It is to that friendship that I owe my professional survival and quite possibly my life.
“As was customary, I left New York for two years to study in Europe. I wanted in particular to observe Billroth, who, with apologies to Gross, was certainly the finest surgeon in the world. While there, I observed the most extraordinary phenomenon, not from Billroth, but from one of his students. Mikulicz, the Pole, had taken to employing clamps to stanch the flow of blood whilst he operated on the large bowel, thus improving his view of the affected region. I realized immediately that not only would clamping render the tissues in the open area more visible, but that it would prevent surgical shock. That, in turn, would not only save lives in and of itself, but would also allow the surgeon to proceed at a more thorough, less frenetic pace. When I returned, I employed both clamping and asepsis, and achieved astounding results.”
“You must understand, Ephraim,” interjected the Professor, as Halsted took a sip of tea, “that the innovations Dr. Halsted employed at first made him an object of ridicule. He was, after all, only twenty-eight years old. Soon, however, the results inspired many to copy his methods while arousing the enmity and jealousy of others.”
Having seen Burleigh operate, I did not need to be persuaded of that.
Halsted waited until he was certain that the Professor had finished before speaking again. “By 1884, I was at the peak of my profession. I had perfected radical mastectomy, a technique that bears my name and has saved the lives of hundreds of women. I also developed techniques for emergency transfusion and saline infusion as a treatment for shock. I was teaching anatomy to private students, was an attending physician at four hospitals, and was engaged to perform surgery for private patients who paid up to ten thousand dollars for my services.”
Ten thousand dollars? I almost asked Halsted to stop to confirm that stupendous figure, but he was continuing as if he had said “ten dollars.”
“I was also, although it is difficult to comprehend now, considered one of the leading bon vivants in New York, accepted and valued in the highest society. Then, Dr. Carroll, I read an article that changed my life. Karl Koller, a German ophthalmologist, had introduced a solution of cocaine, an alkaloid of Erythroxylum coca, to his own eye, and then pricked it with pins but felt no pain. He had successfully anesthetized the cornea and conjunctiva. Koller, like Mikulicz, saw only the narrow applications of his finding, but I knew at once that he had discovered that cocaine could block individual nerves. It was potentially one of the most important discoveries of the century. As you know, at the time, surgeons had to choose between chloroform and ether. Ether was safe, but unreliable. Anesthetized patients had been known to get up off the operating table and walk away. Chloroform was more reliable, but extremely hazardous. Cocaine seemed to hold promise of both safety and reliability and so I felt I needed to test it at once. I recruited a like-minded colleague at Roosevelt Hospital and we injected ourselves with a solution of the drug.
“Before I continue, it is important to point out that Hall and I were correct. Nerve blocking was possible and cocaine was a correct agent to achieve the result. But, as you know, there were other results as well
. I continued my experiments and within months, I had become addicted.
“I hope for the sake of your soul, Dr. Carroll, that you never have to cope with addiction. It is not, as portrayed in dime novels, a fall from Grace brought on by weak character or a plunge into sin—it is a far more insidious phenomenon that comes on gradually, soundlessly, invisibly. The poor wretch who is afflicted is the last to know and, by the time he does know, the vise has clamped shut and he is doomed.
“We all pass through adolescence, believing that we are in control of our destinies, that life is an exercise in free will. If one’s will is sufficiently strong, there are virtually no obstacles that cannot be overcome.” A wry smile passed across his face. “I know I believed so.
“At Yale, I became a superb athlete despite a lack of stature. Although I received what might best be described as mediocre grades, after I purchased a copy of Gray’s Anatomy in my senior year and decided to become a physician, once again, by dedicating myself to the goal, I made it so. My career was testament to the power of will and the drive to succeed. And success fathered success. What’s more, my achievements were not simply such that they brought me personal wealth or fame—I was saving lives, many lives. If there was a formula as to how one should lead one’s life, I had found it, or so it seemed.
“Imagine then, Dr. Carroll, if you will, the shock when I realized that not only had I fallen into the grip of a hideous drug, but that I was unable, regardless of effort or will, to rid myself of it. That was a far more painful realization than finding myself in the throes of addiction itself.
“The realization did not come immediately. Quite the contrary. At first, I decided that I would overwhelm cocaine as I had overwhelmed every other obstacle. I took a leave from my practice and entered a convalescent clinic in Providence, where I remained for a year. For my first months, although it was torture to abstain, I sustained myself with the knowledge that I was asserting my will over a demon, that I was persevering through to victory. But slowly I wore down. Eventually, I was helpless to resist. I began to make arrangements with members of the staff, the very people who were charged with ensuring that the facility remained untainted, to purchase and smuggle the drug to me. It was a costly proposition, but I would have paid anything.
The Anatomy of Deception Page 25
