“Good. It's a shoddy world, thoroughness is so rare a quality. You personify shoddiness. You were as easy to get to as a sardine in a can. All of you were—tell me, why are psychotherapists such a passive, helpless bunch? Why are you all such absolute wimps—talking about life rather than doing anything?”

I didn't answer.

He said, “You really are, you know. Such an unimpressive group. Stripped of your jargon, you're noth—if that dog of yours doesn't shut up, I'm going to kill him—better yet, I'll make you kill him. Make you eat him—we can grill him on that barbecue you've got out back. A nice little hot dog—that would be justice, wouldn't it—making you confront your own cruelty? Give you a taste of empathy?”

“Why don't we just let him go?” I said. “He's not mine, just a stray I took in.”

“How kind of you.” Jab. My breastbone felt inflamed.

I said, “Why don't we let my friend go, too? She hasn't seen your faces.”

He smiled and settled back a bit.

“Shoddiness,” he said. “That's the big problem. Phony science, false premises, false promises. You pretend to help people but you just mind-fuck them.”

He leaned forward. “How do you manage to live with yourself, knowing you're a phony?”

Jab. “Answer me.”

“I've helped people.”

“How? With voodoo? With bad love?”

Trying to keep the whine out of my voice, I said, “I had nothing to do with de Bosch except for that symposium.”

“Except for? Except for! That's like Eichmann saying he had nothing to do with Hitler except for getting those trains to the camps. That symposium was a public love fest, you asshole! You stood up there and canonized him! He tortured children and you canonized him!”

“I didn't know.”

“Yeah, you and all the other good Germans.”

He spat at me again. The knuckles of his gun hand were tiny cauliflowers. Sweat popped at his hairline.

“That's it?” he said. “That's your excuse—“I didn't know'? Pathetic. Just like all the others. For a bunch of supposedly educated people, you can't even plead for yourselves effectively. No class. Delmar had more class in his little finger than the lot of you put together, and he was retarded. Not that it stopped them from bad-loving him day in and day out.”

He shook his head and flung sweat. I saw his index finger move up and down the trigger. The painful, hungry look on his face made my bowels churn. But then it was gone and he was smiling again.