The Interpretation Of Murder

The Interpretation of Murder
Jed Rubenfeld

 

    

 

 

    

    

    

Copyright © 2006 Jed Rubenfeld

    

The right of Jed Rubenfeld to be identified as the Author
of

    

the
Work has been asserted by him in accordance
with

    

the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

    

First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

    

HEADLINE REVIEW

    

An imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

    

First published in paperback in Great Britain in 2007 by

    

HEADLINE REVIEW

    

An imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

    

15

    

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this
publication may

    

only
be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any
form, or by any means,

    

with
prior permission in writing of the publishers
or, in the case of

    

reprographic
production, in accordance with the
terms of licences

    

issued
by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

    

The Interpretation of Murder
is a work of fiction inspired by the lives

    

of
the historical figures in this publication.

    

Cataloguing
in Publication Data is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0
7553 3142 0 (B format)

ISBN 978 0
7553 3479 7 (A format)

    

Typeset in Bembo by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

    

Grangemouth
, Stirlingshire

    

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

    

Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

    

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HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

    

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To Amy,

    

only
, always

    

and
to

    

Sophia and Louisa

 

Table of
Contents

Part 1
.
11

Chapter One
.
12

Chapter Two
.
18

Chapter Three
.
27

Chapter Four
34

Chapter Five
.
41

Part 2
.
47

Chapter Six
.
48

Chapter Seven
.
55

Chapter Eight
63

Chapter Nine
.
71

Chapter Ten
.
76

Part 3
.
86

Chapter Eleven
.
87

Chapter Twelve
.
97

Chapter Thirteen
.
104

Chapter Fourteen
.
113

Chapter Fifteen
.
120

Part 4
.
129

Chapter Sixteen
.
130

Chapter Seventeen
.
138

Chapter Eighteen
.
145

Chapter Nineteen
.
152

Chapter Twenty
.
159

Part 5
.
166

Chapter Twenty-one
.
167

Chapter Twenty-two
.
176

Chapter Twenty-three
.
183

Chapter Twenty-four
193

Chapter Twenty-five
.
203

Chapter Twenty-six
.
213

Epilogue
.
224

Author's Note
.
226

Acknowledgments
.
229

About The Author
230

 

 

 

 

 

    

    
In
1909, Sigmund Freud, accompanied by his then disciple Carl Jung, made his one
and only visit to the United States, to deliver a series of lectures on
psychoanalysis at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts. The honorary doctoral
degree that Clark awarded him was the first public recognition Freud had ever
received for his work. Despite the great success of this visit, Freud always
spoke, in later years, as if some trauma had befallen him in the United States.
He called Americans 'savages' and blamed his sojourn there for physical
ailments that afflicted him well before 1909. Freud's biographers have long
puzzled over this mystery, speculating whether some unknown event in America
could have led to his otherwise inexplicable reaction.

Part 1

 

 

    

Chapter One

    

    There is no mystery to happiness.

    Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound
they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark
of love put out by scorn - or worse, indifference - cleaves to them, or they to
it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man does
not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present.

    But there's the rub. The present can
never deliver one thing: meaning. The ways of happiness and meaning are not the
same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live
for
the moment. But if he wants meaning - the meaning of his dreams, his
secrets, his life - a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for
the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before
us all, insisting only that we choose between them.

    For myself, I have always chosen
meaning. Which, I suppose, is how I came to be waiting in the swelter and mob
of Hoboken harbor on Sunday evening, August 29, 1909, for the arrival of the
Norddeutsche Lloyd steamship
George Washington,
bound from Bremen,
carrying to our shores the one man in the world I wanted most to meet.

    At 7 p.m. there was still no sign of
the ship. Abraham Brill, my friend and fellow physician, was waiting at the
harbor for the same reason as I. He could hardly contain himself, fidgeting and
smoking incessantly. The heat was murderous, the air thick with the reek of
fish. An unnatural fog rose from the water, as if the sea were steaming. Horns
sounded heavily out in the deeper water, their sources invisible. Even the
keening gulls could be only heard, not seen. A ridiculous premonition came to
me that the
George Washington
had run aground in the fog, her
twenty-five hundred European passengers drowning at the foot of the Statue of
Liberty. Twilight came, but the temperature did not abate. We waited.

    All at once, the vast white ship
appeared - not as a dot on the horizon, but mammoth, emerging from the mist
fullblown before our eyes. The entire pier, with a collective gasp, drew back
at the apparition. But the spell was broken by the outbreak of harbormen's
cries, the flinging and catching of rope, the bustle and jostle that followed.
Within minutes, a hundred stevedores were unloading freight.

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