The doctor’s hands were trembling as he took the clutching end of the clothes-pin and put it in his mouth. On some days, there was no other way to negotiate past the pain that caused his jaws to lock up. Carefully, he pushed the head of the pin past his lips, up to his gums, and then tried to wedge it between his clenched teeth.

Fighting back tears, he began to bargain. A dull, persistent throb he could accept if he could stay off the morphine and maintain a clear mind. The occasional hot skewer up through the cheekbone could be borne, even as his eyes blurred with tears. What he quietly feared was overwhelming, incapacitating anguish that would render him finally useless and put the work of his life at a permanent end.

It was autumn of 1938 and the news on the radio was not good. The Germans had crossed the border into Austria in March, meeting no resistance. He had tried to tell himself that this could be lived with. But then had come the introduction of the racial laws and the decrees that all Jewish assets were assumed to be improperly acquired and therefore subject to confiscation without advance notice. When they burned his books in the street, he joked about the progress of civilization. “In the Middle Ages, they would have burned me.”

But then Nazis had shown up at the offices of the publishing company he owned, aiming a gun at his son and confiscating the financial ledgers. Soon after, the Gestapo had come to his home in Vienna without an appointment, leaving Berggasse 19 with six thousand schillings in cash. After that, he had no choice but to call upon favors from foreign friends in high places so that he could find another country that would accept him and the rest of the family should they manage, by some miracle, to be able to flee Austria with a few remaining assets.

Now he was in London and Hitler’s troops had overrun Poland. On the radio, the Fuhrer was demanding the Czechs leave the Sudetenland. Back in Austria, brownshirts were swinging clubs and breaking windows of stores owned by Jews. The doctor’s relatives who could not get out were being threatened, robbed and beaten on the street almost every week. Such things could not be controlled or reliably contained anymore. At the same time, the cancer in his own body was spreading. He’d recently lost much of his upper palate and right cheek to radical maxiofacial surgery. To block off the space left open between his mouth and the nasal cavity, he’d been forced to wear a large dental prosthesis he called “the monster,” which caused constant irritation and made it difficult for him to talk. His speech, never euphonious, had become labored, nasal, and unpleasant even to his own ears.

He refused to take anything stronger than aspirin for the pain. He was eighty-two years old. The manuscript for his last and most dangerous book—the contemplation of which terrified and excited him at times—sat two-thirds finished on his desk. He knew he would not be able to complete it with a fogged mind. Yet some distraction was required to endure the discomfort and continue his writing.

He took the clothes-pin out of his mouth and turned it around, using the thin slat of a pincer to pry open a larger space between the prosthesis and his lower jaw. Then he jammed a Reina Cubana cigar into the aperture, struck a match, lit it, and lay back on the couch where his patients like Dora and the Rat Man had disclosed their darkest and most troubling secrets.

It had been years since he smoked regularly—the disease had been ravaging him since the 1920s—and he knew his daughter Anna would be furious to find him with a cigar in hand. But what other pleasures were left to an old man in a strange country?

True, the Nazis had surprised him by unexpectedly releasing some of the furniture and books from his Vienna study after he paid the exorbitant taxes and duties demanded. He took a measure of solace as he looked around. The famous couch was against a wall, covered by velvet pillows and a Persian blanket with byzantine designs as rich and complex as the dreams of the patients who used to lie upon it. Just behind the head was the green tub-like chair where he would sit sideways, out of the patient’s sight, taking notes. On the walls were some of the pictures from back home: the carved mountainside temple of Abu Simbel, the depiction of Oedipus interrogating the sphinx, the photographs of certain dear friends. The mantles, bookshelves, and even his desktop were engulfed by pieces from his massive collection of Egyptian antiquities—Osiris, Isis, and figurine of the warrior goddess—but a special place of honor was accorded to the small statue of the Greek goddess Athena, whose calm thoughtful expression reminded him of his beloved daughter Anna.

Even among these familiar possessions, he had spent too many hours lately depressed and lost to himself in this room. But now, as he took his first puff, he became the master of his mood once more, magisterial and wise, the heady aroma in his nostrils, and blue smoke going down into his lungs summoning memories of better days. Yes, sometimes, a cigar was not just a cigar.

“Father, what are you doing?” Anna was in the doorway.

“Let me be.”

She came toward him, with her hand out. His beloved daughter. Gaunt, too wise for her own good, and still unmarried at forty-three. He worried for her, especially the degree of repression revealed by his own analysis of her. But she was his joy and hope for the future. The last and most capable of his six children. Her keen and incisive mind was the most like his own, and he strongly believed that one day she would become an estimable psychoanalyst in her own right. When it was time to flee Austria, she had handled the most troublesome details. More important, she was the only person he trusted to help him put the prosthesis into his aching mouth every day and to continue his life’s work after he was gone.

“Where did you get that from anyway?” She reached for the cigar.

“That annoying Mr. Dali who came to visit the other day,” the doctor confessed. “His paintings leave me cold. But the cigars he brought are superb so far.”

“If you’re smoking one of them now, you must be even more insane than he is. You’re a doctor who doesn’t listen to his own physician. Aren’t you sick enough?”

“Yes, I’m sufficiently sick. But if you want me to live longer, let me finish this cigar.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She plucked it from between his withered fingers. “They’ll cut the rest of your jaw out if you keep doing this.”

“Better to cut off the whole head and be done with it.” He muttered between clenched teeth.

“Anyway, you have a visitor.”

“Is there an appointment?”

With the dislocation and lack of sleep these days, his grasp of his schedule wasn’t what it once was.

“No. And I’m not at all sure you should see him.”

“Who is it?”

“Anton Sauerwald.”

He’d been sitting in his desk chair with its stark totem-like back, with one leg slung over an arm. At once, he came to attention.

“Sauerwald from Vienna?”

“The same.”

He watched her sweetly protuberant eyes and slightly lopsided mouth for a hint of a smile.

“He’s downstairs right now.”

The doctor stroked the white beard that had become more of a chore to trim lately. “What does he want?”

“He wouldn’t tell me.” Her words came out in an uncharacteristic rush. “He insisted he must speak to you in private. He says it’s a matter of great concern. I’m surprised they even let him in the country.”

“Some of the English still think appeasement is possible,” the doctor muttered. “They don’t know enough about aggressive urges.”

“I’ve told him to leave already but he’s very persistent. He politely requested that I at least tell you he was here and mentioned that you both knew Josef Herzig.”

“Show him in,” the doctor sighed, waving away the lingering dragons of smoke in the air.

“Are you sure?”

“Shall I ask twice?”

Anna looked in distaste at the smoldering cigar between her fingers and left the room. He listened to the strain of polite conversation in the foyer and the singing of birds in the garden. A heavy tread on the stairs caused a slight tightening of his stomach. He wished she hadn’t taken the Cubana with her.

“Dr. Freud?”

The man before him was in his thirties, of medium build, with blond hair and blue-gray eyes. He wore a dark wool suit, narrow at the waist and broad in the shoulders, probably the handiwork of one of Vienna’s finest tailors provided at a steep coerced discount. His nose was reddish and waxy-looking as if he’d scrubbed at it too vigorously. Under his arm, he carried a brown leather attaché case, bulging at the seams.

“Pardon me if I don’t get up,” the doctor said through gritted teeth, and passed a hand to indicate the length of his slowly atrophying body.

“I understand.” Sauerwald nodded curtly. “May I take a seat?”

Freud nodded toward a plain wooden chair near the bookcase. Instead Sauerwald took the doctor’s own plush green chair behind the head of the couch.

“Do you know who I am?” Sauerwald asked, turning the chair so he could look straight at Freud.

“I have heard your name.”

“I’m sure you have.” Sauerwald put the leather case flat on his lap. “Years ago, I was a student of Dr. Herzig’s at the University of Vienna.”

“Herzig was a good man and a fair card player,” Freud said, parceling out his words judiciously. “You are a chemist then.”

“Yes, I had my own laboratory in Vienna before I was hired by the government.”

“Ah…”

“Of course, this was a few years ago, when one had to wear one’s Fatherland Front pin on the outside of the lapel and the swastika on the inside. The National Socialists were considered to be a terrorist group then, setting off bombs all over Vienna. My job was to work with the police, analyzing the contents of the material that was used in these explosions. Which I did very well, you see. Because thanks to our friend Dr. Herzig, I have learned to cultivate the virtues of patience, observation, and careful planning.”

Freud put a hand over his mouth, revealing nothing by his expression. Never betraying that he’d had heard stories before he’d left Vienna. That, in fact, the reason Sauerwald was so efficient at dismantling these devices and determining the content of explosives was that he’d created them himself in his own laboratory the day before. Patience, observation, and careful planning.

“But you did not come here to talk about ordnance,” Freud said matter of factly.

“No, herr professor, you are right.” Sauerwald patted the case on his lap. “We have even more urgent matters to discuss. I know you have heard my name more recently because I am a member of the National Socialist Party now. I am one of those given the task of liquidating illegal Jewish assets and turning the profits over to the Reich. And I have been assigned to take a special interest in you and members of your family.”

“I see.”

“As I’m sure you remember, Dr. Freud, members of the party came to your publishing office and your home in Vienna to conduct a thorough investigation and confiscate the relevant records.”

State-sanctioned thuggery. The doctor grimaced as the prosthesis dug into his badly-damaged soft palate, under pressure from the tongue he was trying to restrain. Not only had Nazi criminals come to the publishing office and stuck a gun in his son Martin’s stomach while rifling the safe and stealing every coin they could find. Then they had come to his house down the street and taken six thousand Austrian schillings as their due. But worst of all, the Gestapo had detained his precious Anna for questioning, leaving her father pacing the floor, smoking cigar after cigar, unable to speak or eat, as he fretted that she’d been taken to the camp in Dachau that people were starting to talk about. When she was finally returned to him, exhausted but intact, he’d wept and sworn he would use whatever strength he’d left in his cancer-ravaged body to get them out of Austria.

“What you may not know,” Sauerwald said, “is that I personally went to your publishing office after these oafs trampled though, and I looked for all things they might have missed.”

“As I recall, there wasn’t much left.” Freud fidgeted in the swivel chair before his office desk.

“To the contrary, these idiots were so busy stuffing their pockets with money that they missed what was most valuable on the premises. Your books and papers.”

Freud said nothing, adjusting his spectacles and staring intently.

“I must confess that even though I’d heard Professor Herzig speak highly of you, I had never actually read your work before.” Sauerwald rubbed the palms of his well-manicured hands over the surface of the attaché case, warming to his subject now. “As I said, most of my training has been in the field of chemistry, so this business of suppressed desire and hidden aggression had not much interested me before. But as I read through your papers, I found a world that I had not known about before. You are the great discoverer of people’s secrets, herr professor. Aren’t you?”

“Some people have said that.” Freud shrugged. “But I find it a crude and reductive description of psychoanalysis.”

“Do you?” Sauerwald thrust his lower lip in a mock-pout. “Well, I believe I have discovered some of your secrets, Dr. Freud.”

Freud took a small sharp breath and cold stinging air passed through a small gap in the roof of his mouth.

“I’m not sure I understand,” he said.

Sauerwald pulled several pieces of paper out of the leather case on his lap.

“These are letters of correspondence to banks in Zurich, Paris, and London. You have been sending money overseas for years. This is entirely illegal.”

The doctor said nothing.

“You could have been detained from leaving Austria and your whole family could have been imprisoned,” Sauerwald said, his voice rising in stentorian admonition. “It was a clear act of disloyalty that could have been punished.”

The doctor tried to use the tip of his tongue to shift the prosthesis to a more comfortable position as the cords of his throat tensed.

“You should have been prosecuted to the full extent of the law.” Small white flecks of spittle flew from Sauerwald’s lips. “You profited from the neuroses of the bourgeois class when our nation was starving. You violated racial laws restricting Jewish parasitism. You committed acts of treason by diverting this money from the national treasury.”

As he spoke, Sauerwald slapped the top of the attaché case, which continued to bulge as if a heavy item was still inside. His complexion became rough and spongy, and his voice began to crack.

“Your age and fame are no excuses,” he continued. “You should be dangling from the end of a hangman’s rope with your family beside you, instead of living out your days in comfort with your beloved statues and pictures around you, and your daughter brewing tea for you in the kitchen. I could have stopped you from leaving at any time and made sure your life ended in agony without adequate medical care. And my superiors in the party would have thanked me by advancing my career.”

“But you did not,” Freud observed quietly.

“No. I did not.”

Sauerwald exhaled and relaxed his hands, allowing the normal color to return to his face.

“I was given back my passport and allowed to board the Orient Express with my family,” the doctor noted, taking care to articulate each word despite the prosthesis. “I am in another country, safe from ‘the hangman’s rope,’ as you call it. My wife is with me, my children are secure. But you continue to speak as if I had reason to fear you. Why?”

“Dr. Freud, you still have four sisters living in Austria,” Sauerwald replied. “Don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“For the moment, they are safe and free. But I promise you, under the Reich, that will not last.”

The doctor looked away, his eyes gliding past all his other rescued antiquities as he thought of his spinster sister Dolfi. An old maid who had devoted her life to caring for their mother. Freud’s jaw ached and dampness spotted the corner of his right eye as he sniffed deeply.

“So what is it exactly that you came here to discuss?” he asked.

“I wish to talk to you about books, Dr. Freud.” Sauerwald crossed his ankles, settling in more comfortably.

“Books? ”

“Yes, the books that you are writing and the books that you will publish. Of course, you are much more experienced than I am in this realm, Dr. Freud. So I believe we can help each other.”

“How can that be?”

“If I may?” The corners of Sauerwald’s eyes crinkled as he put down the leather case and stood up. “I’ve been looking at a pile of papers sitting on your desk as we’ve been speaking. They appear thick enough to be the body of a manuscript.”

Freud did not turn. He knew exactly what page was on top.

“Would I be right in assuming that this is the doctor’s latest book?” Sauerwald asked, starting to cross the room.

“It might be,” Freud grunted.

“Then this would be the long-awaited Moses book, wouldn’t it?”

Sauerwald was standing less than a foot from him now, hovering vampirishly over Freud’s desk, staring at the pages written in longhand through hours of excruciating pain.

“It might be,” Freud said, refusing to meet Sauerwald’s eye or acknowledge that this guest in his house had transgressed by coming into such close physical proximity with his private work area.

“You’ve been working on this for some time, haven’t you?” Sauerwald let his fingertips lightly brush the curled corner of a page. “I read the excerpts in Imago.”

Freud looked askance. “I am surprised that high-ranking members of the Nazi party subscribe to obscure journals for psychoanalysts.”

“You’re forgetting that I am a doctor and scientist myself, herr Freud.” Sauerwald pursed his lips as if insulted. “And I am not quite a high-ranking member of the party. At least not yet. But as I said, I have taken a keen interest in your work since going through your papers.”

“I should be flattered, then,” Freud said drily, still refusing to look at him, even as the flowery smell of Sauerwald’s cologne made him cringe inwardly and caused his eyes to water.

There was a soft ripple of paper as Freud realized that the guest was now turning pages.

“You are a very brave man, Dr. Freud. You’ve said many things other people were afraid to say in the course of your work.”

“Some of my critics think that they should never have been said.”

“Yes, of course.” Freud turned his head just enough to see the visitor nodding and turning pages more quickly. “The ego and the unconscious. The unhealthy repression of sexual urges. The fixations with anal and oral functions. The death drive. Few people would have dared to think of such things, let alone commit them to paper.”

“Perhaps so.”

A thatch of blond hair fell over Sauerwald’s ruddy brow, and he swiped it away in a state of growing excitation.

“But up until now, you have never been afraid to publish any of it. I’ve read Totem and Taboo, The Interpretation of Dreams, Future of an Illusion, and Essays on the Theory of Sexuality …”

“I hope you paid for all of them, instead of borrowing library copies,” Freud interrupted.

Sauerwald gave a hoarse barking laugh. “Yes, I’ve also read The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious. Amazing. Fantastic stuff. Only you would have been daring enough to write it.”

“Or be foolish enough to write it,” Freud said, aware of a stiffening throughout his body.

“But you have not published this Moses book yet.”

“It’s not finished.”

“No?”

He turned and saw his guest pick up the pages, weigh them in his hand, and return to the chair behind the head of the couch. Then Sauerwald donned a pair of glasses, crossed his long legs, and began to read more closely.

“Are you are forgetting that I’ve been in your office and seen your notes?” Sauerwald asked evenly, pushing the center-piece up his nose. “You see, I know you have been working on this Moses book for years. This is actually much of the same material I saw back in Vienna. The book was finished long ago. But you have not published it. What is the reason?”

“I think the only one who can say when a book is truly done is the author.”

“You are lying and we both know it.” Sauerwald gave him a glacial stare. “You have not published this book because you’re afraid to do so in this lifetime.”

“I’ve heard the Nazis were working on a number of scientific breakthroughs,” Freud broke in. “I didn’t realize mind-reading was one of them. Perhaps you’ll render psychoanalysis obsolete without having to kill me personally.”

“I don’t blame you for being frightened of your own book.” Sauerwald ignored him and held up a page. “Your thesis is a highly disturbing one. If you had simply stated your theory that Moses was not a Jew, but an Egyptian, that would be enough to cause an uproar.”

“What do you want, Mr. Sauerwald?”

“Doctor Sauerwald. I studied medicine and law at the university, so I am due that respect as much as you are. And may I remind you, Dr. Freud, we were speaking of your sisters before.”

Freud cupped a hand over the lower half of his face, his jaw almost exploding with pain as he clenched it. “Yes,” he said, between his teeth. “I have not forgotten.”

Sauerwald took another page from the top of the manuscript and put in on the bottom. “It’s a blasphemous notion, but you don’t stop there,” he said blandly. “You assert that if Moses existed, then he was almost surely a follower of the pharaoh Akhenaten.”

“Correct.” Freud nodded calmly as the image of Munch’s screamer flashed in his head.

“And this pharaoh was the first monotheist, the individual who insisted on destroying images of all the other great Egyptian gods in favor of worshipping just the one sun god.”

“I am not the first to suggest something like that. Greater scholars have put forth similar theories.”

“But you go much further than anyone before you.” Sauerwald reached for the figurine of Neith on a nearby shelf, but then thought better of it. “You say that after Akhenaten died and Egypt went back to its many old gods, this Moses, the gentile, this fanatic, sets out into the desert with a ragtag group of Hebrew followers, where he convinces them to join up with the wandering cult of a violent volcano god to form a new heretic religion.”

Freud steepled his fingers, choosing his words as carefully as a sculptor choosing his stone. “Yes, I believe it’s possible that is what happened, but I never claimed to be an historian or an archeologist. I’m just an old man speculating.”

“Of course, doctor, that is what you do in analyzing the human mind. You speculate. You conjecture. You make an educated guess. And as your fame and status suggest, you have very often been right.”

“‘Often’ is not the same as always,” Freud demurred. “I have been spectacularly wrong more than once.”

“Don’t be modest.” Sauerwald took several more pages from the top of the manuscript and placed them on an old mahogany side-table. “We’re coming to the best part. The murder mystery.”

Freud tried to shift the pressure from the right side of his jaw to the left, lest the remains of his fragile face collapse from the way he was grinding his teeth.

“Are you under the impression you were reading Sherlock Holmes?”

“Not at all. I know I am reading a book by Sigmund Freud. Because no one else could have written it. In the midst of this scholarly work, you have posited something even more astonishing. You accuse your own people of one of the greatest crimes in all of history. ”

Freud tried to swallow, but his salivary glands would not cooperate. “You misunderstand my work.”

“I don’t think I do, herr professor.” Sauerwald tapped the pages with a shiny fingernail. “You say the Jews killed their own prophet and then covered up the crime. You state this with absolute clarity and boldness in your writing. You say the strictures of this severe new religion were too much for these wandering Hebrews. And so they rebelled and murdered their leader. And then buried him somewhere in the sands of the Sinai desert, where his bones would never be found. And that generations later, the unexpiated guilt of this sin rose up in their souls and led them to proclaim Moses’s one god as their own and conveniently forget the fact that they had murdered Moses for saying the exact same things many years before. It’s brilliant and original. Only you could have written it, Dr. Freud. And I can see why you’ve been so afraid to publish it.”

Freud winced and sniffed. Hating the fact that this swine was half-right. Just the other day, his neighbor, the great Jewish Bible scholar Abraham Shalom Yehuda had stopped by and, just on the basis of the relatively tame Imago excerpts, pleaded with Freud not to publish this scandalous Moses book. His voice had joined with the letters the doctor had received from Jews in America, who had heard rumors of the text and begged him to suppress it. Especially now, when the world was on the brink of war, and recent events in Germany suggested that their tribe in Europe would soon be threatened with annihilation.

“Sauerwald…”

The name sounded like a curse, a damp and swampy thing laden with foul-smelling funguses.

“I find it hard to believe that you traveled all the way from Vienna to London in order to speak to me about a book that has not yet gone to press.”

“Yet? ” The visitor’s nostrils flared. “Is this deliberate or one of the famous slips you accuse others of making?”

“I do intend to publish this book.” Freud jabbed an unsteady finger into the air. “I’ve spent my life saying things that most people in polite society think should never be said. Why would I stop now?”

Sauerwald stooped his shoulders and offered his palms. “Because some people think you would be giving support to enemies of your race?”

Freud cleared his phlegm-ravaged throat and glared. “You are mistaken. The point of my book is not to discredit the religion of my people. It is to consider the distinctive characteristics of the Jewish people and to try to understand how they might have evolved over time.”

“But you must recognize that some people would use your book as justification for staying out of a war to save Jews,” Sauerwald said, goading him shamelessly.

“You give me far too much credit for being influential.” Freud shook his head, refusing the bait. “I very much doubt this slender volume you’re holding would change anyone’s mind about anything.”

“An author is often the worst judge of how a book will be received.” Sauerwald chuckled and rocked back so that his feet left the floor. “I applaud your decision to go ahead, nevertheless. Is there a publication date?”

“It needs to be translated and copy-edited in several languages. My American publisher expects to have it out by spring next year.”

“Wunderbar. ” Sauerwald’s smile faded as quickly as a flashbulb dimming. “Excuse me, Dr. Freud. But I would like now to ask an impertinent question.”

“Now you are worried about manners?”

“It’s no secret that your health has deteriorated greatly in the last few months, and that you have been suffering greatly.” The visitor thinned his liver-colored lips. “Do you expect to be alive by the time your book comes out?”

Several seconds of silence passed. Birds began to sing, trying to fill the empty space, and then stopped. A toilet flushed somewhere in the house. A baby cried out on the street.

His life’s work had been the study of raw emotion. He had made a habit of measuring and analyzing his own responses with as much detachment as possible. But, for an instant, he became a child of the Vienna streets, broiling with scarlet rage as his meek father had a beautiful new fur hat knocked from his head by a Jew-hating brute and failed to retaliate with appropriately unrestrained violence.

“That is an ugly and inhuman thing to say,” he said quietly. “If not for my sisters, I would demand that you leave my home now”

“But you know you will not.”

“What is it you want then? For God’s sake, out with it already.”

Sauerwald sat back and laced his hands behind his head, tauntingly. “I would like you to help me become an author.”

“Are you serious?”

“I have never been more serious.” The visitor undid the snaps of his attaché case and took out a slender volume with a brown leather cover and gold lettering on the spine. “I took this manuscript to one of the finest bookbinders in Vienna and paid for the work out of my own pocket.”

And probably took your money back after you had him arrested, Freud thought grimly.

Sauerwald smiled, the skin as tight as a sausage casing over his features, then put the attaché case aside and stood up. He crossed the room with a brisk ebullient stride and handed the book to Freud.

The doctor took it and placed it on his lap, closing his eyes for a moment to collect himself. “This is a book you wrote?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Sauerwald nodded.

“Are you asking me to read it and offer a critique?”

“Both more than that and less than that.”

“I don’t understand.” Freud blinked.

“Open the cover.”

With stiff gnarled fingers, Freud did as he was asked and his eye glanced over a title rendered in fourteen point Garamond type: The Theft of the Birthright. But then his eye found the author’s byline and his heart stopped for a good half-second.

“What do you mean by this?” He looked up, translucent whorls and eddies floating before his eyes.

“You should be even more flattered.”

“I should be flattered that my name is on a book that I did not write?”

“Most writers would be delighted to have someone else produce their work for them.” Sauerwald waggled his eyebrows roguishly. “I would expect you to say thanks.”

Freud’s hands shook as he began to turn the onion-skin pages quickly, looking for thoughts and words that he might recognize as his own. Like most writers, he was the most fervid admirer and the fiercest critic of his own prose, and was always pleased when he detected his own influence on the work of others. But here was a book that claimed to have him as an author, and its style was appalling. Barbaric phrases and sentiments abounded from every paragraph. “These so-called holier-than-holy chosen people … A pattern of mendacious deceptive audacity repeated audaciously throughout the tortured course of history … The most monstrous of all lies told with the cleverness of ants … the sanctimonious legitimacy of parasitic larceny …”

“This is work that you’re trying to pass off as mine?” Freud closed the cover and set the book down on the edge of his desk, a wave of dizziness and nausea causing him to pitch forward a little in his creaking chair. “Why would you do such a thing?”

Sauerwald had returned to the green seat behind the head of the couch. “I’m merely taking up what you suggested in your Moses book and bringing it to its logical conclusion. I’m saying what even you, herr professor, lacked the nerve to say.”

“Which is what?”

“That this entire religion, this entire race, this entire culture—as some people insist on calling it—is based on an even greater lie than the murder of a prophet and its concealment. It begins with an astonishing act of fraud and bad faith, and only gets worse from there.”

Freud’s fingers grappled among themselves, trying to select a single digit to grip as a cigar substitute. “Explain yourself.”

“It would be far better if you would take the time to read it. I’m quite proud of it.”

“Spare me the effort. As you say, I’m an old man. And I’m sure you can summarize the contents.”

Sauerwald sighed, a look of unmistakable disappointment tilting down the corners of his mouth. “Well, if you insist …” He huffed. “I tried to the best of my abilities to emulate your style and mimic your methodology. Like yourself, I take the Bible as my source material, then I put it on the couch like a patient and dissect it without fear or favor.”

“I do not dissect patients.” Freud moved his tongue around inside his mouth, trying to rid himself of the taste of decay. “I analyze them.”

“A fine distinction, but not important here.” Sauerwald smirked. “I began with an origin myth that takes place long before this Moses legend. You are familiar, of course, with the story of Abraham in the Book of Genesis?”

“I suppose this will concern the attempted sacrifice of the son Isaac.” Freud shifted restlessly. “I’ve already written about some of these themes in Civilization and Its Discontents …”

“Please don’t try to anticipate. I really do wish you would approach this book with an open mind. We begin before that primal scene you describe. When Abram—as he was called then—leaves the land of Ur with his barren and disagreeable wife Sarah and sets out for Canaan. Somehow they wind up in Egypt, where in a burst of shameful cowardice Abram lies to the pharaoh and says that Sarah is his sister because he fears he will be killed otherwise. Instead the pharaoh discovers the truth and treats both of them honorably.”

“A curious section, but I wouldn’t make too much of it.” Freud shrugged.

“Except that it sets a pattern that continues and escalates. A few chapters later, after God has promised Abram that he will make a great nation of his descendants and award them the land from the Nile to the Euphrates, he has a son. Only it’s not born from Sarah, who is still barren. But from an Egyptian handmaiden named Hagar who gives birth to Ishmael, a strong capable boy and a worthy heir.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with this narrative.” Freud rolled his hand with barely constrained disgust. “Get to your point.”

“By all lights, this first-born should be a true descendant in the line of prophets,” Sauerwald said, enjoying—no! luxuriating— in the sound of his voice. “Instead, the authors trump up this preposterous tale about the child’s mother ridiculing Sarah as an excuse to cast mother and child out into the desert. Somehow they survive and become acknowledged as the progenitors of the great Arab tribes. Meanwhile, Sarah finally manages to have a child of her own, this Isaac, who somehow supplants his half-brother in the line of succession—”

“Everyone knows this, Sauerwald. There’s no need to rub my face in it …”

“Please, herr professor, you’re interrupting yourself.” Sauerwald sat back and placed his hands on his stomach. “In this next section of your book, which is handled with great élan if I don’t say so myself, you demonstrate that this proclivity for dishonesty and larceny continues down through the bloodlines. Isaac has two sons. Esau, who is strong and hairy, and Jacob, who is weak and shiftless. By law, Esau, the first-born, should inherit all his father’s land. Instead, Jacob conspires to trick his brother out of his birthright. Jacob goes to Esau when he knows his older brother is exhausted and hungry from working the fields and then fools his sibling into trading away his rightful due for a bowl of porridge. He compounds this injustice later, by going to his blind father on his deathbed and disguising himself with furry gloves to simulate Esau’s hairy hands so he can cheat his brother out of a father’s final blessing. Then down through the ages, the tribes of Esau become the people of Edom, who become part of the Arab race and … ”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Freud pounded the arms of his chair, losing patience. “What is your point?”

“To show the true nature of things. To undermine this patently false Zionist narrative and reveal its true psychological underpinnings. In your terms, the Jews try to conceal the guilt for their own historic crimes, but they give clues in spite of themselves.”

Freud’s entire body had started to shake, but he tried to keep his voice steady. “In other words, you hope to give support to anti-Semites all over the world, and discourage the allies from getting involved in the war.”

“Really, I implore you to read your own tome.” Sauerwald pointed to the book on Freud’s lap. “It’s quite scintillating, if I may say so. You make a very cogent argument and support it with voluminous scholarship. I spent more than twelve months doing the research and marshaling my sources. I’ve spoken to some of the most important archeologists and theologians in all of Austria and Germany. I’ve studied ancient texts and compared translations…”

“I’m sure you made half of them up yourself,” Freud said.

“If I did, I wouldn’t be the first,” Sauerwald riposted. “And do you honestly believe most readers bother with footnotes?

“You actually believe that I would publish such a book under my own name?” Freud said fiercely, creating an unexpected shock of pain by the sudden movement of his jaw.

“I’m sure you would not find it difficult to place it. Your authority goes far beyond the field of psychiatry now. I read in the newspaper that you were recently given the honor of signing the charter book for the Royal Society of England—your name inscribed beneath Newton’s and Darwin’s …”

Freud winced, the memory of the Society’s secretaries coming to his house to present the ledger personally souring and turning gray behind his eyes.

“Why would anyone take this seriously coming from me?” he argued. “I am not a historian or a Bible scholar.”

“No, but you are truly one of the most respected eminences on the continent,” Sauerwald spoke over him. “In the world, in fact. Anything you write would command attention from an international audience and have instantly credibility.”

“Sauerwald.” Freud mustered the strength to slam a gavel-like fist on his desk. “The world is on the brink of war. Jews like myself are being robbed, persecuted, and even murdered under the color of law on the streets and in the houses of every country where your party holds sway. Do you honestly think I would aid in hurting the cause of my own people?”

“I believe you would do what you needed to do to protect your sisters.”

“And so that is the choice you give me? Save my sisters or put my name on a book intended to defame and harm the race that I belong to?”

“It would appear so.” A tiny smile tugged at the corner of Sauerwald’s mouth and as his hands rested on his belly, two fingers flexed with a hint of playfulness. “If you insist on putting it that way”

Freud sank down in his seat, seething at his own helplessness. At the betrayal of his body. At the betrayal of his countrymen back home. At the betrayal of the European allies. At the betrayal of humanity at large for allowing people like Sauerwald to spread such lies in the service of further German atrocities. He began to breathe more heavily, as if he was starting to suffocate under the accumulating weight of history. This would not do. His chin began to wag from side-to-side, an involuntary old man tremor turning into a deliberate headshake.

Almost without conscious decision, he took the book off his lap and set it aside on his desk. Then he picked up his fountain pen, the implement of his trade, which he’d used to take notes on his famous patients. He brandished it, like a cowboy in one of the American movies he so deplored, strapping on his gun one last time, and reached for a notepad. Then he narrowed his eyes and tried to imagine Sauerwald stretched on the couch, instead of sitting in his green chair.

“Sauerwald, tell me something,” he said. “What is your purpose in writing this book?”

“Dr. Freud, I think I’ve been very clear about my motives.”

“Have you?” Freud touched his pen to the corner of a blank notebook page. “To write a book of any kind is a serious undertaking, requiring a great commitment of time and effort. I’m interested why you chose to write about these particular themes in a book that you’ve put my name on. The betrayal of Ishmael, the theft of Esau’s birthright…”

“Very clever.” Sauerwald interrupted. “Perhaps you are onto something.”

“How so?”

“You mentioned that this book could be construed as helping our war effort.” Sauerwald’s Adam’s apple bobbed behind the tight red knot of his necktie. “But it could be said that it was written with an eye toward the future as well. And I believe the future belongs to the Arabs.”

“The Arabs?”

“Of course.” Sauerwald offered his palms like a waiter showing an expensive wine list. “Everyone else will be focused on the war here in Europe for the next few years. Eventually, though, the conflict will move to the Allies’ colonial holdings in North Africa, where the Arab population is substantial. And where there is oil. And whoever controls the oil to feed the tanks and airplanes will win the war.”

“Excuse me, Sauerwald.” Freud picked the book off his desk again, where it had been sitting among his collection of totems and figurines. “But how would a fraudulent volume about ancient prophets possibly be of any benefit to twentieth-century Germans in the Middle East?”

“The leaders of these Arab countries will appreciate the attack on their blood enemies, the Jews, and support us in gratitude.”

Freud nodded twice, and then bowed his old bald head, as if he was resigned to the logic. The rumors about Sauerwald were undoubtedly true, he now realized. This was a man who could design bombs for the Nazis and then take credit for defusing them for the police the next day.

“But there is one obvious flaw in all this, isn’t there?” Freud said. “How will this supposed Arab appreciation for an attack on the Jews redound to you and the Germans if the name on the title page belongs to an old Jewish doctor?”

Sauerwald crossed his arms in front of his chest and raised his chin proudly. “Dr. Freud, if you would only take the time to open this book and read it more closely, you would see there is an acknowledgments page. You give effusive thanks to your invaluable colleague and successor, Dr. Anton Sauerwald, without whom this final testament would not have been written. Through diplomatic channels, the Arabs will be made aware of the true authorship and then they will show their gratitude appropriately.”

Freud stared at his visitor for a long time without speaking. The quality of light changed in the room as the sun shifted. A clock chimed on the parlor floor. He heard the fluff of bedsheets as his wife changed the linens across the hall, and the tread of Anna’s feet as she came up the stairs. A few stray pellets of water hit the windows behind him, and then began to land sequentially on the grass and peonies below, an English rain turning torrential on the garden.

“Sauerwald,” he said. “I believe you misunderstand yourself even more severely than you misunderstand my Moses book.”

“What do you mean?” Sauerwald’s narrow shoulders went back into the upholstery of Freud’s green chair.

“You say you have read my writing extensively. So did it never occur to you as you were creating this forgery that you were fixating on stories like Abraham’s denial of Ishmael and Isaac’s mistaking Jacob for Esau?”

“These are the stories in the Bible, Dr. Freud. I didn’t create them.”

“But you chose to focus on them. Narratives about fathers and sons.” Freud made another note on his pad, to deliberately draw the guest’s attention. “Does that not strike you as curious?”

“What are you driving at, herr professor? ”

“You did not write this book for the Fatherland.” Freud reached over and tapped the leather cover with his crooked aged finger. “You did not write it for the Arabs either. In fact, you did not write it for the war effort at all.”

“Then why do you think I wrote it, Dr. Freud?” Sauerwald tried to affect a grin as his arms stayed wrapped tight around his chest.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Freud shrugged. “You mentioned my great friend Dr. Josef Herzig from Vienna. You call yourself my successor. Is it that hard to imagine you see us both as father figures?”

Sauerwald shook his head. “I already had a father, herr professor. This is absurdly reductive.”

“It’s not surprising you would say that.” Freud turned another page in his notebook and continued to scribble. “Most people are unaware of their own true motives. You are just an extreme example. It’s plain that you come here seeking approval and absolution from me…”

“Herr professor, this is nonsense.” Sauerwald raised his voice, as his pant cuffs hiked up showing pale shins and black garters holding up his socks. “You cannot psychoanalyze me like one of your neurotic patients. I have the advantage here. I hold the cards, as you might have told Dr. Herzig. Your sisters’ fate is in my hands.”

“Is it really?” Freud lifted the tip of his pen from the page and held it up for effect. “Didn’t you tell me earlier in this conversation that you are not a high-ranking member of the Nazi party?”

“Yes, I said that, but I was being modest.” Sauerwald looked down and uncrossed his ankles. “Everyone knows I am in good favor with our leaders and my star is shining brightly in Berlin.”

“Then why are you in London, trying to blackmail an old man with cancer?”

Freud picked up the book that Sauerwald had brought and tossed it down onto the carpet between them. It landed on its side with a muffled thud and splayed open, with a couple of its pages spilling out. So much for Vienna’s finest bookbinder.

“Dr. Freud, that was a mistake.” Sauerwald’s face began to turn bright red.

“Spare me, please.” Freud shook his head. “Your promise to protect my sisters is meaningless. Even if you were sincere, you do not have the power to do anything for them.”

“You don’t know that.” Sauerwald puffed up in the seat.

“Herr Sauerwald, I will die very soon,” Freud slowly lifted his eyes from the book on the floor. “You will die sometime after that. Probably not in as much pain, which is as good a proof as any that there is not a just and fair God. And long after we are both gone, there will still be good and bad men. And good and bad books. There will be people with characteristics of the Jews and those who hate them. What we do and say here today won’t matter. So throw your stupid book away when you leave here. Don’t disturb the forests any further by causing trees to be cut down for the paper to print such nonsense. Submit to the dust.”

Sauerwald stood up abruptly and snatched the book off the floor. He closed it carefully, wiped the cover with his palm and then hugged it tightly to his chest.

“You should not say such things, herr professor.”

“Why? Do you still insist I should fear you?” Freud closed his notebook and put down his pen. “I’m an old man at the end of his life. My immediate family is safe here in England with me. And my sisters are beyond your control. So why exactly should I not say such things?”

“Because they are not the truth.” Sauerwald’s voice cracked like an adolescent’s before he caught himself. “I mean to say, they are not the whole truth. Yes, it’s a fact; I cannot save your sisters. But I did save you.”

“Excuse me?”

“I speak honestly now.” Sauerwald’s eyes had begun to brim. “You cannot dismiss me so easily. Without my help, you and your family never would have gotten out of Vienna alive. I made it possible to get back your passports. I could have had you all arrested for stashing money in foreign banks and sent to the work camps, where you would have surely died horrible deaths. You would not have had the chance to finish your Moses book. I could have wiped you all out and—yes— advanced my career to the very top of the hierarchy with just one phone call.”

“Maybe so…”

“And my good deeds continued even after you were gone.” Sauerwald pointed to objects around the room, his voice rising close to a hoarse shout. “All these beloved possessions that comfort you in this terrible time? I was the one who arranged to have them sent to you. Your books. Your rugs. The rare antiquities you have arranged just so. Your photographs and paintings. The chair you’re sitting in. I could have withheld them from you. Just as I could have withheld the passports for your most precious possessions, your children, your legacy…”

In his high dudgeon, Sauerwald failed to notice that Anna was standing in the doorway, alarmed. Freud looked at her sternly, forbidding her to enter or interrupt.

“I could have denied you all of that.” Sauerwald shook a fist. “I could have made your final days a misery, to my own lasting benefit. But I did not.”

“And why didn’t you?” Freud looked up at him with quiet owlish curiosity.

Sauerwald’s fist fell to his side. “I’m not entirely sure,” he said haltingly. “I’ve asked myself the same question several times.” He gathered himself up and took a deep breath, as if to deliver a speech he’d practiced to himself. “The Fuhrer, who of course knows best, realizes that the Fatherland is in a state of siege. The Jews, due to their internationalist leanings and their tendency toward individualistic behavior, cannot form a reliable part of the population. Thus they have to be eliminated. This might be deplored, but the end justifies the means. This does not mean, however, that an individual should not be permitted to alleviate individual hardship in selected cases.”

“Perhaps that’s true.” Freud opened a desk drawer. “Some aspects of human behavior cannot be explained by any theory. They are mysteries that cannot be solved. And sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.”

He took out a new Cubana Reina and stuck it in the corner of his mouth, defying Anna to stop him.

“And in that case, there is nothing more for us to say to each other. Goodbye, Sauerwald.”

“Goodbye.” Sauerwald turned to leave, his shoulders sagging as he saw Freud’s daughter had witnessed the end of the exchange.

“And Sauerwald, one more thing.”

“What, herr professor? ”

Freud gestured with his unlit cigar at the loose pages on the floor. “Don’t forget to take the rest of your book with you.”

Background note: Anton Sauerwald was a true historical figure. He was a former student of Freud’s good friend Dr. Josef Herzig, who was later assigned by the Nazi party to oversee the confiscation of assets from the Freud family’s publishing venture. Sauerwald did, in fact, discover that Freud was circumventing the law under occupation by transferring those assets to foreign banks. However, despite, his own good standing as a member of the Nazi party, he did not alert his superiors. Instead, he made it possible for Freud to escape with family members to England, where Freud died on September 23, 1939.

Sauerwald went on to serve as a technical expert in the Luftwaffe as part of the Nazi war effort. He was arrested by the Allies and sent to an American prisoner of war camp, then released in June, 1945. He was re-arrested several months later at the insistence of Harry Freud, a nephew of the famous doctor, then serving as an officer in the American army. Sauerwald was accused of abusing his position as a trustee to rob the Freud family of valuable assets, including cash, manuscripts, artwork and books. His trial lasted eighteen months, with Sauerwald held in detention throughout. He was released when Sigmund Freud’s daughter Anna wrote a letter to the court, declaring that the Nazi officer had helped her family. Sauerwald later moved to the Tyrol and died in Innsbruck in 1970.