I watched him reflexively touch his breast pocket while we waited for an elevator. “Have you stopped smoking? Or remembered buried secrets about your mother?”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Vic. She put me in a light trance so I could see what it was like, not a deeper one for memory recovery. Anyway, she never uses a deeper trance until she’s worked with a patient long enough to make sure they trust each other. And to make sure the patient’s strong enough to survive the process. Arnold Praeger and the Planted Memory guys will definitely be sorry they’ve tried to trash her reputation when this book comes out.”
“She’s put some kind of spell on you,” I teased as we rode to the lobby. “I’ve never heard you abandon journalistic caution before.”
He flushed. “There are legitimate grounds for concern with any therapeutic method. I’ll make that clear in the text. This isn’t an apology for Rhea but a chance for people to understand the validity of recovered-memory work. I’ll give the Planted Memory camp their say. But they’ve never taken the time to understand Rhea’s methods.”
Don had first met Rhea Wiell when I did, four days ago, and he was already a true believer. I wondered why her spell didn’t work on me. When we met on Friday, she’d realized I approached her with skepticism, not Don’s admiration, but she hadn’t tried to charm me out of it. I’d thought perhaps she didn’t try as hard with women as with men, but the young patient in the waiting room was clearly also a votary. Was Mary Louise right? Did Rhea and I instinctively distrust each other because we both wanted to command the situation? Or was my gut telling me there was a problem with Rhea? I didn’t think she was a charlatan, but I did wonder if a steady diet of adulation from people like Paul Radbuka had gone to her head.
“Earth to Vic—for the third time, do you want coffee while we wait?”
I realized with a jolt that we were standing outside the elevators on the ground floor. “Is that what hypnosis is like?” I asked. “You become so lost in your own space that you lose awareness of the outside world?”
Don steered me outside so he could light a cigarette. “You’re asking a novice. But I think they consider losing yourself like that akin to a trance. It’s called imaginative dissociation, something like that.”
I stood upwind from him while he finished his cigarette, checking in again first with Tim Streeter, who said there was nothing new to report, and then with my answering service. By the time I’d returned a couple of client calls, Don was ready to move into the hotel for a cup of coffee. In the tree-filled terrace at the Ritz, I got him to give me a digest of the research he’d been doing the last four days.
He had a wealth of data about the way in which hypnosis had been used to treat people with traumatic symptoms. One man who’d had terrible fantasies about having his neck wrenched off his shoulders turned out to have seen his mother hanging herself when he was three: his father was able to confirm all the details that the son produced under hypnosis. The father had never discussed them with his son, hoping that the boy had been too young to understand what he was watching. There were also plenty of documented cases of people hearing what was said around them under total anesthesia and being able to reconstruct whole operating-room conversations through hypnosis. Rhea herself had worked with a number of incest victims whose memories recovered under hypnosis had been validated by siblings or other adults.
“We’re going to be using several pairs in one chapter—the holder of memory and the suppressor of memory. But of course the most interesting chapter will be about Radbuka. So neither Rhea nor I is at all happy to have you questioning the validity of what he’s saying.”
I rested my chin on my hands and looked at him squarely. “Don, I don’t doubt the value of hypnosis, or the validity of recovered memories, under certain strict guidelines. I sit on the board of a women’s shelter, and I’ve witnessed the phenomenon myself.
“But in Radbuka’s case, it’s a question of who he is—emotionally and, well, genealogically, for want of a better word. Max Loewenthal isn’t lying when he says the Radbukas aren’t related to him, but Paul Radbuka so desperately wants the relationship to exist that he can’t pay attention to reality. I can understand it, understand how growing up with an abusing father would make him reach out to other relatives. If I could just have access to some background information about him, I might be able to track down where—if at all—his life intersects with any of Max’s London circle.”