learned about his. . . obsession with young girls.”
“How young?” Reese asked.
Solberg hesitated. “I feel as if I’m. . . betraying him.”
“We may already know much of what you’ve got to tell us,” Julio said.
You’ll probably only be confirming what we know.”
“Really? Well… I knew of one girl who was fourteen.
At the time, Eric was thirty-one.”
“This was before Geneplan?”
“Yes. Eric was at UCLA then. Not rich yet, but we could all see he
would one day leave academia and take the real world by storm.”
“A respected professor wouldn’t go around bragging about bedding
fourteen-year-old girls,” Julio said.
“How’d you find out?”
It happened on a weekend,” Dr. Solberg said, “when his lawyer was out of
town and he needed someone to post bail. He trusted no one but me to
keep quiet about the ugly details of the arrest. I sort of resented
that, too. He knew I’d feel a moral obligation to endorse any censure
movement against a colleague involved in such sordid business, but he
also knew I’d feel obligated to keep any confidences he imparted, and he
counted on the second obligation beingstronger than the first.
Maybe, to my discredit, it was.
Easton Solberg gradually settled deeper in his chair while he talked, as
if trying to hide behind the mounds of papers on his desk, embarrassed
by the sleazy tale he had to tell. That Saturday, eleven years ago,
after receiving Leben’s call, Dr. Solberg had gone to a police precinct
house in Hollywood, where he had found an Eric Leben far different from
the man he knew, nervous, uncertain of himself, ashamed, lost. The
previous night, Eric had been arrested in a vice-squad raid at a hot-bed
motel where Hollywood streetwalkers, many of them young runaways with
drug problems, took their johns. He was caught with a fourteen-year-old
girl and charged with statutory rape, a mandatory count even when an
underage girl admittedly solicits sex for pay.
Initially Leben told Eiston Solberg that the girl had looked
considerably older than fourteen, that he’d had no way of knowing she
was a juvenile. Later, however, perhaps disarmed by Solberg’s kindness
and concern, Leben broke down and talked at length of his obsession with
young girls. Solberg had not really wanted to know any of it, but he
could not refuse Eric a sympathetic ear. He sensed that Eric-who was a
distant and self-possessed loner, unlikely ever to have unburdened
himself to anyoneHiesperately needed to confide his intimate feelings
and fears to someone at that bleak, low point in his life. So Easton
Solberg listened, filled with both disgust and pity.
“His was not just a lust for young girls,” Solberg told Julio and Reese.
“It was an obsession, a compulsion, a terrible gnawing need.”
Only thirty-one then, Leben was nevertheless deeply frightened of
growing old and dying. Already longevity research was the center of his
career. But he did not approach the problem of aging only in a
scientific spirit, privately, in his personal life, he dealt with it
“You urged him to seek psychiatric help?” Julio asked.
“Yes. But he wouldn’t. He was an extremely intelligent man,
introspective, and he had already analyzed himself.
He knewr at least believed that he knew-the cause of his mental
condition.”
Julio leaned forward in his chair. “And the cause as he saw it?”
Solberg cleared his throat, started to speak, shook his head as if to
say that he needed a moment to decide how to proceed. He was obviously
embarrassed by the conversation and was equally disturbed by his
betrayal of Eric Leben’s confidence even though Leben was now dead.
The heaps of papers on the desk no longer provided adequate cover behind
which to hide, so Solberg got up and went to the window because it
afforded the opportunity to turn his back on Julio and Reese, thus
concealing his face.
Solberg’s dismay and self-reproach over revealing confidential
information about a dead man of whom he had been little more than an
acquaintancemight have seemed excessive to some, yet Julio admired
Solberg for it. In an age when few believed in moral absolutes, many
would betray a friend without a qualm, and a moral dilemma of this