Jonathan Kellerman - The Conspiracy Club

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what it was. Gross. And the way he smirked. ‘I can make you happy.’ What macho bravado b.s. The idiot’s watched too many porno movies. He was letting me know I was nothing to him. That he was in charge… but jeez, how could I be so stupid !”

“You were caught off guard,” said Jeremy. “It happens to all of us.”

“Not to you, I’ll bet. You’re so… composed. You think everything out. Choose your words before you speak. Your training- all the people you’ve worked with- you probably never get caught off guard.”

A knock sounded on the door, and Angela jumped.

Jeremy opened it.

A young man in orderly’s yellows stood there holding a white coat and a stethoscope.

“Is there a Dr. Rios, here?”

“I’ll take those,” said Jeremy.

“Sure, Doc. Dr. Dirgrove says you left them in his office. He says to tell you hi.”

Jeremy closed the door.

Angela said, “He knew exactly where I’d go.”

Jeremy said, “I guess it’s no secret.”

Thinking: That’s the point. Dirgrove had gotten a kick out of letting the two of them know he had them pegged. This was all about power. Telling them who was in charge.

An errant memory flashed in his head. Last week, leaving Angela’s house late at night, he’d believed someone had followed him in a car.

When the vehicle quickly went its own way, he’d dismissed it as paranoia. Now, he wondered.

Shortly after that, Dirgrove had asked for his help with Merilee Saunders.

Dr. Sensitive, worried about his patient’s anxiety. Or something else?

Not bothering to inform the patient about the consult- setting Jeremy up for failure.

Then the patient dies. Just one of those things.

Informing Jeremy via Angela that he’d done a great job when he’d accomplished nothing.

Playing with him? One way or the other, he sensed he’d be dealing with Dr. Theodore Dirgrove.

He walked a very subdued Angela back to the wards and told her he’d stay late, they’d have dinner in the cafeteria.

“Not the doctors’ dining room,” she said.

“Not tonight, but eventually we’ll go there, too. To hell with him.”

“If I get phobic, will you do therapy with me?”

“Rapid therapy,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

She kissed him full on the lips. “Despite all you went through as a kid, you grew into a prince.”

“C’mon up to my place, got a glass slipper for you.”

“I mean it. I’m serious.”

Jeremy returned to his office remembering boarding school bunks hard and flat as slate, the crispness of early-morning reveille, institutional food, the knowing smiles of those who fit in.

Back to the computer. There’d been nothing on Norbert Levy in the Clarion archive so it was time to expand to the Internet.

The first few citations Jeremy found for the retired professor had to do with his scientific work. Levy had been instrumental in the development of ultrahigh-reliability capacitors for use in spacecraft, ship gyroscopes, and weapons systems.

But the hit that held Jeremy’s attention longest was something else completely: an account of an East Coast symposium on the Holocaust, convened by a survivors’ group.

The rubric of the gathering was the complicity of non-German Europe: Swiss bankers hoarding stolen billions, Spanish and Italian and Scandinavian diplomats purchasing plundered artwork on the cheap, French politicians claiming to have resisted the Nazis when the facts revealed them to have been easy collaborators.

Levy, a holder of two doctorates- in physics and engineering- had become involved because of personal history. His father, Oscar Levy, a prominent German-born physicist, had left the Fatherland in 1937, when anti-Semitism at his university department led him to seek, and receive, a teaching post at Oxford. The following year, Levy, his mother, and two sisters were spirited to England and avoided the deportations that resulted in the deaths of their entire extended family. The family home in Berlin and its contents were confiscated by the Nazis. Gone were generations of personal effects as well as a collection of Egon Schieles, Gustav Klimts, and other expressionist masterpieces.

Those paintings, now valued in the tens of millions, had never been recovered, most probably hoarded by some private collector. Norbert Levy had chosen to address the symposium about morality.

The old professor hadn’t been victimized by any single homicide. His focus was on the worst of crimes.

Jeremy found no full-text account of the remarks, but after considerable web-surfing, he managed to find a summary in a site called JewishWorldnet.com.

Noted Scientist Says Intelligence Has

Nothing to Do with Morality

Renowned physicist Professor Norbert Levy delivered an address to the members of the Committee on Plundered Art (COPA) in which he criticized the continuing inertia of European governments and museums in owning up to complicity with Nazi war crimes. Despite continued evidence that a substantial number of current European art holdings consist of treasures confiscated by Hitler’s SS, very little has been done to locate stolen art or to compensate the original owners.

Levy’s speech drew from a wide range of sources as he illustrated how some of the brightest minds of the most civilized nations in the world had stooped to barbarity with relative ease. The award-winning scientist, in the past mentioned as a potential Nobel nominee, quoted the psychiatrist/novelist Walker Percy to that effect: “You can get straight A’s but still flunk life.”

“Intelligence is like fire,” Levy went on to say. “You can burn down the house, learn to cook, or forge beautiful works of art in a kiln. It comes down to personal morality, and that quality is sorely lacking in a good deal of what passes for intelligent society. The key to personal and national growth is combining moral training with intellectual rigor. The thirst for justice trumps everything else.”

Though emphasizing that he was not a religious man, Levy stressed the influence Jewish humanistic values had played in his upbringing and he drew upon scriptural texts, citing calls for justice in the Bible and in the Talmudic tract, Ethics of the Fathers.

Jeremy searched for more on Levy’s extracurricular activities but found nothing.

He plugged in “Edgar Marquis” minus the “homicide” limitation, and came up empty, again. Against all hope, he tried “Harrison Maynard.” The writer had hidden behind a pen name, no reason to assume he’d go public about anything.

But Maynard’s name appeared on the tribute committee of an East Coast dinner honoring the memory of Martin Luther King. Just a list with no links, one of those isolated cyberscraps floating around the cosmos, bereft of context.

“Martin Luther King memorial dinner” produced a single reference, a recent affair in California, and Maynard’s name was nowhere to be found. Jeremy broadened the search to “Martin Luther King memorial” and came up with nearly three thousand hits. He downloaded for nearly two hours before finding what he was looking for.

Pages from a banquet journal. Photos of celebrated guests and benefactors. And there was Harrison Maynard, a trifle thinner, his hair and mustache a bit less gray, but otherwise the same man Jeremy had supped with.

Smiling and well fed and natty in a tuxedo. Next to him stood Norbert Levy, also in formal wear. The white-bearded physicist remained unidentified in the caption. Maynard was described as a former associate of Dr. King, among the first to rush to the slain civil rights leader’s side as he lay dying in a motel parking lot. Harrison Maynard was now “a major benefactor of humanitarian causes.” No mention was made of how he’d made his money.