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  “Considerably, if he allows it. That’s an important point, Melanie. There are violent criminals who spend most of their lives behind bars, who tell us nothing of their actions or motives. But if they do allow us access, we can learn much about them. We can learn about childhood patterns that affect their later life, and about the interplay of familial and cultural influences. We can learn about subtle neurological impairments they often have.” He touched briefly on some current research about the brain physiology of violent offenders, about their CT scans and MRIs. “Now all these factors,” he concluded, “may play a role in the creation of personalities we know as evil.”

  Fuller turned first to Evers, then to Gottlieb. “There was a time, gentlemen, when your fields overlapped quite a bit. People attributed mental illness to demonic possession. Do we still find much of this kind of thinking?”

  Evers responded first. “Perhaps not in contemporary Chicago, but we can surely find it. My colleagues who work in isolated areas, with, uhm, less sophisticated parishioners, might see it frequently. This is more Dr. Gottlieb’s area than mine, but I believe we’ve always had a tendency to demonize what we can’t understand.”

  The camera turned to Gottlieb, who nodded. “Let’s try to put ourselves in the places of our ancestors of five hundred or a thousand years ago. They saw these strange people, these misfits, whom we now would deem mentally ill. These people were buffeted by baffling and terrifying forces, for which there was no everyday frame of reference. Our ancestors’ understanding of human behavior, like their understanding of the natural world as a whole, ranged from limited to none. So they created demons to explain the inexplicable. To do so made perfect sense, from their perspective. Most likely we’d have done the same, if we’d lived then.”

  “The notion of creating demons to explain the inexplicable has value to a historian as well,” Professor Wirth broke in. “Again, we might consider the case of Germany after World War I. Despite a strong work ethic, high productivity and great valor on the battlefield, Germany lost the war. Instead of the fruits of victory, a once-great nation faced humiliation, economic collapse, and universal suffering and deprivation. It was easy to create a demon to account for this, and Hitler did it: international Jewry. It was relatively easy for him, given the context of German anti-Semitism.”

  Fulton turned to Wirth again. “Does this tendency to demonize account for the other great modern Holocausts? The Turkish experience in Armenia or Cambodia of the Pol Pot era, for example?”

  “Yes, it plays a role in them. The particulars vary, as do the historic animosities which underlie them, but that common thread runs through all of them. I suppose it really has to be that way. It’s hard to do away with millions of people unless you believe they’re demonic in some way.”

  The camera pulled back to capture all the panelists at once before it fell again on Fuller. She faced her right again. “Reverend Evers, let’s go back to religious views of evil. The most dramatic representation of evil, of course, is Satan. Do contemporary theologians see Satan as reality or metaphor?”

  He stroked his beard before answering. “You’ll find no consensus on this, Melanie, but I believe that many theologians nowadays, perhaps the majority, would interpret Satan as a metaphor. As an embodiment of selfishness . . . malice . . . arrogance. Put simply, an embodiment of everything we think of as ungodly.” He took a sip of water and went on. “I should add that the Bible itself is inconsistent in how it deals with Satan. In the Old Testament, for instance, Satan is a minor figure, mentioned by name on only four occasions. In what is arguably his most important appearance, in the book of Job, he’s almost a necessary figure, whom God needs to test the faith of Job. In the New Testament, he’s much more a figure in his own right.”

  Fuller pressed him further. “If we accept the notion of God as omnipotent, the Creator of everything, then wouldn’t we have to accept Him, logically, as the Creator of Satan too?”

  “There are theologians,” he replied slowly, “who argue that

  God was obliged to create the opportunity to do evil, or else to do good would mean little. Now, if by creating the opportunity to do evil—in effect, by giving us some choice in the matter—He created Satan, I suppose the answer would be yes. He would have had to create Satan as an agent of our freedom of choice. Again, it comes down to our notion of what Satan is. Is he a metaphor, or a discrete embodiment of evil?”

  Wirth interjected: “The notion of a powerful, discrete embodiment of evil . . . of Satan, if you will . . . may be outdated or even archaic, but it’s hard to give up if you’ve made a close study of the Holocausts.” The quiet precision of her speech did not conceal an understated passion. “It’s hard to give up if you’ve made repeated trips to Auschwitz,” she concluded, “if you’ve walked around the gas chambers and crematoria.”

  Fuller broke the silence that ensued. “This question is addressed to Dr. Gottlieb, but I’d like to hear our other panelists’ views as well. From medieval representations of demons to the latest Stephen King novel, the western cultures have paid great attention to the diabolical. Why does evil fascinate us so?”

  “I believe there are several reasons,” began Gottlieb. “We explore the nature of evil to understand our worst behavior, and our enemies’ behavior. Why are they like that? Why are we like that? When we contemplate the evil acts of others, we wonder about our own capacity for evil. Could we behave that way? But part of its appeal, if that’s the right word for it, may go back to our basic physiology, to something as basic as adrenaline. Evil makes us fearful, and fear can be exciting, even pleasurable, to a point. Look at the popularity of roller coasters or horror movies.”

  “I agree with Dr. Gottlieb,” Evers added, “especially about the contemplation of our own capability for evil. Mankind has always waged a battle to keep his own worst tendencies in check. Sometimes we win this battle, although God knows we often lose it. Maybe part of how we fight this battle is to remind

  ourselves, over and over, about the presence of evil. That cert-

  ainly could be a piece of our fascination with it.”

  “The battle to keep our own worst tendencies in check reminds me of a well-publicized psychology experiment of several years ago,” resumed Gottlieb. “I’ll try to summarize it. Students were instructed to give their subjects increasingly painful electric shocks, under the supervision of the experimenter, and acting on his orders. The subjects were actually accomplices, and they weren’t being hurt at all, but the students didn’t know that. They followed orders and continued to administer electrical shocks, even when their subjects screamed in pain.”

  He paused. “Now these were ordinary college students. It’s unlikely that they were secret sadists or sociopaths. But they taught us a great deal, regrettably, about how most of us could be coerced into committing what we classify as evil acts.”

  “As a historian, I find such an experiment very interesting but not surprising,” Wirth commented. “Most of the perpetrators of Nazi atrocities were ordinary men and women. A reasonable cross section of lower middle class German society. I don’t know as much about the other recent atrocities, but I suspect the same was true of those who tortured and exterminated in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. “

  The discussion was taking a troubling turn for Reverend Evers. A wan smile flickered across his face. “But let’s not hold too dim a view of humanity here. There have always been people—the majority, one dares to hope—who simply wouldn’t torture or exterminate. There have always been people, ordinary decent types, who resisted evil, often at a terrible risk to themselves. There were, for instance, many German Christians who took a stand against the Nazis, sometimes at the cost of their lives.”

  “There were, indeed,” retorted Wirth. “Just as there were church leaders, both Catholic and Protestant, who turned a blind eye toward what was happening. Some of them tacitly con-

  doned it, and that includes some bishops and cardinals.

  “I’d like
to go back to Melanie’s question about why we find evil so fascinating,” Wirth went on. “I don’t pretend to have the answer, but it occurs to me that evil almost always interests us more than good. Let’s face it, serial killers captivate us more than saints. A book about Hitler will always do better than one about Mother Teresa. Look at our literary classics. I challenge you to find more compelling characters in all of Shakespeare than Richard III and Macbeth.”

  While the camera was still on Wirth, Fuller stole a quick glance at the studio clock. “I wish we could carry on indefinitely, but unfortunately we’re running out of time. I’d like to pose one last question, a very broad one, to our panel. Do you believe there are genuinely evil people or merely sick ones? Perhaps Dr. Gottlieb could take the first stab at it.”

  Gottlieb took a moment to collect his thoughts. “I suppose,” he said finally, “that that’s the basic question, isn’t it? The one that cuts to the heart of all our disciplines. My own view is this: there are people who commit terrible acts, for reasons we can’t fathom, and we’ve grown used to thinking of them as evil. They aren’t sick, at least not in the same sense as schizophrenics or those with a bipolar disorder, but they’re certainly impaired. The English philosophers of two or three centuries ago described them as suffering from moral insanity, and that might be a useful way to think of them. The fact is, we’re just beginning to study them seriously. We’re about where our surgical colleagues were a century or so ago. Give us another hundred years, another two hundred, and my guess is that we’ll view them as truly sick.”

  In fact, Gottlieb had his doubts about this. Through the years, he’d encountered a small number of violent criminals who fell into none of the standard diagnostic pigeonholes, whose actions went beyond the merely sociopathic. Shortly after he’d started to do forensic work, he evaluated a thirty-four-year-old who’d plunged a pitchfork repeatedly into his seventy-year-old father on their small family farm. The last time, he’d plunged it in so hard that it came out the old man’s back. Their previous relations had seemed all right, and there had been no obvious provocation. When Gottlieb met him in his cell, the perpetrator munched on an apple as he leafed through a Sports Illustrated and hummed “Jingle Bells” (it had been the week before Christmas). He talked about what he’d done with a blandest indifference and not the smallest scintilla of remorse. Gottlieb had encountered inmates who’d committed worse offenses, but none with that degree of sangfroid.

  “I should add,” continued Gottlieb, “that many psychiatrists would vehemently disagree with me. They’d maintain the view that there’s a small number of genuinely evil people, whose evil natures have nothing to do with the traditional psychiatric illness.”

  “As a historian,” Wirth offered, “I have to side with them. I believe that many of the ranking Nazis—the lesser lights, too, some of them—were truly evil. The perfect example might be Himmler, an even better example than Hitler himself. Here was a man who, as head of the SS, conceived and organized the machinery of death that took perhaps ten million lives. But I agree with the brilliant British historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who wrote that Himmler was not a sadist! By all accounts he took no pleasure in the deaths he caused. Of course, he took no displeasure in them either. A profoundly stupid man, albeit with a certain flair for administration. Naïve, and callous beyond our wildest reckoning, and incapable of an original thought. Fairly ordinary, in most respects—a chicken farmer, before he joined the Party—except that he just happened to be evil.”

  Fuller turned to Evers. “And your view, Reverend?”

  The clergyman spoke slowly. “I’ve bandied this question around for years. There were times when I’ve felt certain that evil people did exist, and other times when I’ve felt just as certain that they didn’t. And now, at this point in my life, I don’t know. I believe there are weak, misguided individuals who, under certain circumstances, commit what we know as evil acts. They’re often poorly educated, but not always. Nazi Germany’s Mengele and Haiti’s Duvalier were doctors, and Pol Pot was a teacher. But there’s a key distinction, I believe, between evil acts and those who commit them.

  “When we speak of those who are evil,” Evers went on, “we often mean beyond redemption. I believe one of religion’s chief purposes is to allow us to redeem ourselves, to escape and transcend the burden of our worst and most shameful deeds. And I believe redemption is obtainable, even by those who commit them, should they be open to it.”

  “And on that encouraging note,” said Fuller, “we have to end. Let me take this opportunity to thank our panelists for their participation in a lively, provocative discussion. I hope our viewers have enjoyed it as much as I have. Please join me next week for another edition of Roundtable.” The camera pulled back for one last shot, framing all four of them against the backdrop of the Chicago skyline.

  ⸎

  Melanie thanked them again, and the three guests left the studio together. It was after seven when they emerged from the air-conditioned lobby, but the temperature still hovered in the eighties.

  Gottlieb turned to them. “I wouldn’t mind getting something cold to drink. Would either of you care to join me?”

  “Sounds good,” replied Cassandra, but the clergyman declined. He said good-bye, shook their hands, and headed towards a parking garage.

  She looked down the block and pointed to a smallish building with a red-white-and-green striped awning. “That Italian restaurant might have a lounge.”

  “Let’s see,” said Gottlieb. They walked down the street in silence; the evening made it too hot for idle chatter.

  The restaurant did have a lounge, cool and dark, almost

  empty. Subdued lighting softened the garish crimson wallpaper.

  They sat themselves in a booth, and the waitress took their orders: a Michelob Light for him, a white wine spritzer for her.

  “So, Ms. Wirth—”

  “Please call me Cassandra,” she broke in.

  “All right. And I prefer to go by Hal.”

  He patted drops of sweat on his forehead with the edge of a cocktail napkin. “So, Cassandra, how do you think it went?”

  “Pretty well, I guess. I don’t have much to compare it to. I do a lot of lecturing, but I don’t appear on many panels.”

  “Same here,” he said. “I thought she did a good job, though. She kept bouncing it around from one of us to another, she kept it well paced. And she didn’t let anyone get too ponderous.”

  “She also did her homework. Not all of them do, believe me. I’ve been on programs where we were supposed to be discussing one of my Holocaust books, and the host didn’t have a clue about it. I was once in some wretched corner of Nebraska, on a local talk show, and some breathless bimbo asked me if they allowed Jews in the SS. You’d be amazed by people’s ignorance about the Holocaust.” She caught his look of incredulity. “Hard to believe, I know, but true.”

  “How did you become so interested in it?” he asked, after the waitress brought their drinks.

  She drank a hefty swallow of the spritzer and set the glass on its coaster. “Oh, there are several reasons,” she said finally, “but I really don’t feel like going into them just now. To tell you the truth, Dr. Gott . . . Hal . . . I can get burned out on the Holocaust, and the nature of good and evil and the rest of it. It all gets to be so heavy. Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

  He shrugged. “It’s what she said when she introduced us. I’m an assistant professor of psychiatry, and I also have a small private practice. Most of my work is at GCFI, though. Every so

  often I testify in criminal cases.”

  Her interest picked up. “What’s that like for you, the

  testifying?”

  “At first it made me sick. I mean literally. I’d have an upset stomach and diarrhea for a day beforehand. It’s better now, at least that doesn’t happen. But the courtroom’s not my favorite place. It never will be. The whole experience is stressful as hell, and full of pitfalls. An expert witness ca
n easily wind up sounding like an idiot. And testimony takes huge chunks of time. Not just the time in court, the preparation too. The case files can run to four hundred or five hundred pages, sometimes more.”

  “Why do you do it, then?”

  “That’s a long story,” he replied, not curtly but making it clear that he didn’t want to answer.

  They said little as they sipped their drinks, enjoying the coolness and quiet. He caught her looking at him more intensely than he was used to being looked at. “Tell me more about yourself,” she pressed him.

  He took a moment to summon up a few details. “I grew up in Minneapolis, went to medical school here in Chicago. Always thought I’d become a neurologist, but kind of got sidetracked into psychiatry. When I finished my training, I practiced downstate for several years. Then we moved to the South. We came back here four or five years ago.” He wondered if this sounded as dry and banal to her as it did to him, but he plugged along anyway. “I’m married. Two children, a fifteen-year-old son who makes my wife and me slightly crazy now, and a four-year-old daughter we dote on shamelessly. What else?”

  “Do you look forward to going to work in the morning? Do you sleep well? Are you happy?”

  He was too taken aback to evade her. “As a rule, yes . . .

  less so recently; and no; and it depends on when you ask me. Do you usually ask such blunt questions when you’ve just met people?”

  “Only if I think they’re worth the bother.” Her voice lost its

  hint of truculence. “The blunt ones are the only ones I know how to ask. I’ve never been worth a damn at small talk, and I never liked it anyway. Cocktail parties! I’d rather have my gums scraped! Faculty parties are the worst. As soon as I got tenure, I stopped going.”

  He wondered if her fondness for candor worked both ways. “How about you? Tell me more about yourself.”

  “Here’s the quick version. I’m an Illinois native, grew up in Champaign. German background, as you may have gathered. BA from the University of Chicago, PhD from Cornell. Never married, no children. I’ve been fascinated by history since grade school. As an undergrad, I never considered majoring in anything else, not for a moment. I care about my work, my cat, reading, writing, cycling, traveling, and that’s about it. I lead a life that many others would find boring if not stultifying, but it suits me fine.”