“Were there black and Mexican children at the school?”

“Yes, but he didn't malign them. It was the workers—hired laborers. There was acreage behind the school. Andres hired people down on lower State Street to come clear the weeds every month or so.”

“What did you hear him say about them?”

“The usual garbage—that they were lazy, stupid. Genetically inferior. He called the blacks one half-step up from apes, said the Mexicans weren't much better.”

“He said this to your face?”

Hesitation. “No. To Katarina. I overheard it.”

I said, “She didn't disagree with him, did she?”

He turned around. “She never disagreed with him.”

“How did you happen to overhear their conversation?”

“I wasn't eavesdropping,” he said. “That would almost have been better. I walked in on the middle of the conversation and Andres didn't bother to interrupt himself. That really troubled me—the fact that he thought I would laugh along with it. And it wasn't just once—I heard him say those things several times. Almost taunting me. I didn't respond. He was my teacher and I became a worm.”

He returned to his chair, slumping a bit.

I said, “Did Katarina respond at all to his remarks?”

“She laughed. . . . I was disgusted. Lord knows I'm no paragon of virtue, I've done my share of pretending to listen to patients when my mind was elsewhere. Pretending to care. Been married five times, never longer than twenty-six months. When I finally achieved enough insight to realize I should stop making women's lives miserable, I opted for the solitary life. Drew plenty of blood along the way, so I don't put myself up on any moral pedestal. But I have always prided myself on tolerance—I'm sure part of it is personal. I was born with multiple anomalies. Other things besides the lack of color vision.”

He looked away, as if considering his choices. Held out his short fingers and waved them. Pointing at his mouth, he said, “I'm completely edentulous. Born without adult teeth. My right foot has three toes, the left one is clubbed. I'm unable to sire children and one of my kidneys atrophied when I was three. Most of my childhood was spent in bed due to severe skin rashes and a hole in the ventricular septum of my heart. So I guess I'm a little sensitive to discrimination. But I didn't speak up, just left the school.”

I nodded. “Did de Bosch's intolerance come out in other ways?”

“No, that's the thing. On a day-to-day basis, he was extremely liberal. Publicly, he was liberal—took in minority patients, most of them charity cases, and seemed to treat them as well as the others. And in his writings, he was brilliantly tolerant. Have you ever read his essay on the Nazis?”

“No.”