"The police are looking for Maslow. If you don't talk to me, Bernie, you'll have to talk with them." Jason tried to be patient.

"Jason? What has happened?"

"I don't have time to go into it. There are police and tracking dogs searching for Maslow in Central Park. I need information right now."

"Well, what do you need to know?" Bernie said hesitantly.

"Was Maslow involved in anything illegal?"

"What? No, no. Of course not!" Bernie sounded shocked. He recovered quickly. "Maslow was a very fine young man. Obsessional with marked sexual inhibitions. We were making very fine progress."

Jason's stomach growled.

"He spent an excessive amount of time studying and exercising, a good boy. He was terrified of his sexuality.

But we were making good progress. Excellent progress." Bernie clicked his tongue, thinking about it. "You know, last week he had a date, his first in a year. He met a girl in the Institute library, a graduate student at Columbia. A fine girl. It didn't go as well as I'd hoped. Unfortunately, her specialty is the representation of the Virgin Mary in the iconography of the Roman Catholic Church. For Maslow, it was as if she herself were a Madonna. He tended to view women as either asexual idealized madonnas or as whores."

That got Jason's attention. "Was there a whore?"

"He did have this analytic patient, the borderline hysteric you were supervising him on. He was troubled by the treatment. He saw her as a wounded bird to be rescued. She was obsessed with him. He thought he saw her on the street, following him. I wasn't concerned about his competence. I felt his anxiety was induced by her intense transference. You were very helpful to him, but of course he felt he couldn't be completely honest about it with you. He was worried that his feelings for his patient were not appropriate and were making her worse. She's a self-mutilator and he feared suicide. My own view is that Maslow had a patient who was trying to get him to enact the overly intimate relationship she had with her father, and it made him nuts as he tried to resist."

It made sense. Jason knew that Maslow's patient had been abused by her father and figured out that she was trying to embroil her young analyst in some kind of reenactment.

"Working, working, run, run, run. That was Maslow. He wanted to keep his feelings at bay," Bernie was saying. "But around this patient, he had uncanny experiences."

"What kind?"

"He thought he saw her on the street. He heard her call his name or thought he saw her. She told him stories that had eerie resemblances to things in his own life. Things that no one else knew. He wondered if she was doing research on him, if she followed him. I told him we've all had experiences where a patient has seemingly supernatural intuitive knowledge. Freud himself believed in telepathy. It doesn't mean that the patient is doing research. Maslow was having difficulty accepting that such feelings are natural for him to have with such an ill patient."

Jason noted that for someone who had been so reticent about confidentiality, Bernie was now spilling out information at a rate of more density that he had in thirty years of Institute meetings, and also that he was talking about Maslow in the past tense. Bernie couldn't be stopped. Now he was Sherlock Holmes.

"But you know, last week he looked up, saw this Virgin Mary girl across the table in the library. They started talking and he asked her out for dinner. It started out well. They were both bright, intellectual, attractive, and the conversation was easy. He asked her about her work. She had documented anti-female bias in the depiction of the Madonna in the church of San Paolo de Tey. Maslow was impressed. She asked him about his work. She was very interested in the concept of penis envy, and it gave him a chance to expound. Then she turned on him, told him that psychoanalysis is phallocentric and a central tenet of the male hegemony. In other words, the date didn't go well. I'm worried about this Virgin Mary girl. She had a lot of anger about this. She could be a latent psychopath who went after him."

"Unlikely," Jason said.

"Well, she hated psychoanalysis-you never know."

"What about homosexuality?" Jason asked.

"Oh, for him just admitting he had feelings for a girl was difficult enough. To help him get in touch with his unconscious homosexuality would have taken another twelve years." Bernie chuckled. "No, he liked girls."

Then his voice changed. "I've got to go. Now I'm going to need you to sign a release for this, Jason. You are to tell nobody. You understand, nobody! I broke analytic confidentiality for you. You have to sign a release."

"Yes, of course," Jason said, thinking Bernie should be so lucky. His stomach rumbled some more. Now he was really concerned. Forget the Virgin Mary, it was that patient contacting Maslow out of his office they had to worry about. They could have underestimated her pathology. Instead of a garden-variety hysteric, she could be a psychotic stalker. And they missed it. He was appalled. They'd been encouraging this boy like a lamb to keep treating the patient in analysis while he became more and more anxious. They missed it, both analyst and supervisor. They'd failed Maslow.

Jason knew he had to talk to this girl right away, but also that he had to go through the Institute to do it. Could he lie to Miss Vialo in the education office to get the patient's chart? His many clocks told him he had three minutes to his next patient, not enough time to start the process.

Jason's patient who was due now came from a mid-town office and was often late. His stomach growled louder, demanding fuel. He'd settle for a soda. Did he dare take a chance on running home for a minute to grab one? He didn't have a door leading directly from his inner office to his apartment. If he wanted to go home, he had to go out into the hall, dash to his front door, unlock it, and duck into the apartment, adrenaline racing with the fear of getting caught. If he were seen going next door, of course, his patient would know where he lived. It was bad enough when they caught sight of Emma. She was a movie star, and her appearance in the hall got them all excited. They wanted to know what she was like and if he knew her. It made him want to move to another planet.

Jason debated quickly: to slip out or not to slip out. Thirst won. The buzzer hadn't rung yet so he strode out into his waiting room. Then, stealthily, he opened the door to the hall. Empty. Good. Heart beating, he sprinted to his front door, opened it, fell in, and slammed it just as the elevator stopped on his floor. Inside the apartment the mail was still stacked on the hall table. In the kitchen Emma waved at him from her stool by the phone. Sounded like she was talking to her agent. Jason kissed her on the forehead, grabbed a diet ginger ale, and poked his head out the door. Damn. In the hallway, the thirty-two-year-old investment banker waiting there had an angry look on his face.

Jason gave the man a weak smile and broke his no food rule. "Hi, want a soda?"

Jergen Walsh put his index finger to his chin. "Do you have a Sprite?"

What did he think it was, a restaurant? "Sorry, no." Jason let him into the waiting room, then excused himself. He dashed into his office, closed the door, checked his machine to see if Jerome Atkins or Maslow Atkins had called. They hadn't. He went back to the waiting room door, opened it. "Please come in."

The young man came into the office, looked around suspiciously, then pointed at a plant in the corner. "What's that doing here?" he demanded.

"Is it a problem?" Jason asked. It was a very pretty geranium plant that Emma had given him.

"It's full of spores. I'm very allergic."

Jason was exhausted. He needed to call the Institute and talk to Miss Vialo. He didn't have time for psychosis. He took the time anyway. Not to deal with Jergen would have made him much worse. No matter what, Jason didn't want to fail anyone else today.