"It's very effective. I've never had a patient complain."
Rhyme blinked and Berger laughed. Rhyme joined him. If you can't laugh about death what can you laugh about?
"Take a look."
"You have it with you?" Hope blossomed in Rhyme's heart. It was the first time he'd felt that warm sensation in years.
The doctor opened his attache case and--rather ceremonially, Rhyme thought--set out a bottle of brandy. A small bottle of pills. A plastic bag and a rubber band.
"What's the drug?"
"Seconal. Nobody prescribes it anymore. In the old days suicide was a lot easier. These babies'd do the trick, no question. Now, it's almost impossible to kill yourself with modern tranquilizers. Halcion, Librium, Dalmane, Xanax . . . You may sleep for a long time but you're going to wake up eventually."
"And the bag?"
"Ah, the bag." Berger picked it up. "That's the emblem of the Lethe Society. Unofficially, of course--it's not like we have a logo. If the pills and the brandy aren't enough then we use the bag. Over the head, with a rubber band around the neck. We add a little ice inside because it gets pretty hot after a few minutes."
Rhyme couldn't take his eyes off the trio of implements. The bag, thick plastic, like a painter's drop cloth. The brandy was cheap, he observed, and the drugs generic.
"This's a nice house," Berger said, looking around. "Central Park West . . . Do you live on disability?"
"Some. I've also done consulting for the police and the FBI. After the accident . . . the construction company that was doing the excavating settled for three million. They swore there was no liability but there's apparently a rule of law that a quadriplegic automatically wins any lawsuits against construction companies, no matter who was at fault. At least if the plaintiff comes to court and drools."
"And you wrote that book, right?"
"I get some money from that. Not a lot. It was a 'better-seller.' Not a best-seller."
Berger picked up a copy of The Scenes of the Crime, flipped through it. "Famous crime scenes. Look at all this." He laughed. "There are, what, forty, fifty scenes?"
"Fifty-one."
Rhyme had revisited--in his mind and imagination, since he'd written it after the accident--as many old crime scenes in New York City as he could recall. Some solved, some not. He'd written about the Old Brewery, the notorious tenement in Five Points, where thirteen unrelated murders were recorded on a single night in 1839. About Charles Aubridge Deacon, who murdered his mother on July 13, 1863, during the Civil War draft riots, claiming former slaves had killed her and fueling the rampage against blacks. About architect Stanford White's love-triangle murder atop the original Madison Square Garden and about Judge Crater's disappearance. About George Metesky, the mad bomber of the '50s, and Murph the Surf, who boosted the Star of India diamond.
"Nineteenth-century building supplies, underground streams, butler's schools," Berger recited, flipping through the book, "gay baths, Chinatown whorehouses, Russian Orthodox churches . . . How d'you learn all this about the city?"
Rhyme shrugged. In his years as head of IRD he'd studied as much about the city as he had about forensics. Its history, politics, geology, sociology, infrastructure. He said, "Criminalistics doesn't exist in a vacuum. The more you know about your environment, the better you can apply--"
Just as he heard the enthusiasm creep into his voice he stopped abruptly.
Furious with himself that he'd been foxed so easily.
"Nice try, Dr. Berger," Rhyme said stiffly.
"Ah, come on. Call me Bill. Please."
Rhyme wasn't going to be derailed. "I've heard it before. Take a big, clean, smooth piece of paper and write down all the reasons why I should kill myself. And then take another big, clean smooth piece of paper and write all the reasons why I shouldn't. Words like productive, useful, interesting, challenging come to mind. Big words. Ten-dollar words. They don't mean shit to me. Besides, I couldn't pick up a fucking pencil to save my soul."
"Lincoln," Berger continued kindly, "I have to make sure you're the appropriate candidate for the program."
" 'Candidate'? 'Program'? Ah, the tyranny of euphemism," Rhyme said bitterly. "Doctor, I've made up my mind. I'd like to do it today. Now, as a matter of fact."
"Why today?"
Rhyme's eyes had returned to the bottles and the bag. He whispered, "Why not? What's today? August twenty-third? That's as good a day to die as any."
The doctor tapped his narrow lips. "I have to spend some time talking to you, Lincoln. If I'm convinced that you really want to go ahead--"
"I do," Rhyme said, noting as he often did how weak our words sound without the body gestures to accompany them. He wanted desperately to lay his hand on Berger's arm or lift his palms beseechingly.