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psychopath test. From the way she described it, it sounded quite odd. She said you can go on a course where Hare himself teaches you ways of stealthily spotting psychopaths by reading suspects’ body language and the nuances of their sentence construction, etc.
    “How old is Tony?” she asked.
    “Twenty-nine,” I said.
    “Well, good luck to Professor Maden,” she said. “I don’t think his offending days are over.”
    “How do you know this?” I asked.
    Suddenly Essi seemed to me like a brilliant wine taster, identifying a rare wine through spotting the barely discernible clues. Or maybe she was like a clever vicar, believing wholeheartedly in something too imperceptible ever to prove.
    “Psychopaths don’t change,” she said. “They don’t learn from punishment. The best you can hope for is that they’ll eventually get too old and lazy to be bothered to offend. And they can seem impressive. Charismatic. People are dazzled. So, yeah, the real trouble starts when one makes it big in mainstream society.”
    I told Essi that I’d seen how Petter Nordlund’s crazy book had briefly messed up her colleagues’ hitherto rational worlds. Of course there was nothing at all psychopathic about Petter—he seemed anxious and obsessive, just like I was, albeit quite a lot more so. But as a result of the Being or Nothingness adventure, I’d become fascinated to learn about the influence that madness—madness among our leaders—had on our everyday lives. Did Essi really believe that many of them are ill with Tony’s condition? Are many of them psychopaths?
    She nodded. “With prison psychopaths you can actually quantify the havoc they cause,” she said. “They make up only twenty-five percent of the prison population but they account for sixty to seventy percent of the violent crime that happens inside prisons. They’re few in number but you don’t want to mess with them.”
    “What percentage of the non-prison population is a psychopath?” I asked.
    “One percent,” said Essi.
    Essi said if I wanted to understand what a psychopath is, and how they sometimes rise to the top of the business world, I should seek out the writings of Bob Hare, the father of modern psychopathy research. Tony will no doubt be incarcerated because he scored high on the Bob Hare Checklist, she said.
    And so, after I left her office, I found an article by Hare that described psychopaths as “predators who use charm, manipulation, intimidation, sex and violence to control others and to satisfy their own selfish needs. Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse. What is missing, in other words, are the very qualities that allow a human being to live in social harmony.”
     
     
    Tony called. I couldn’t keep ignoring him. I took a breath and picked up the phone.
    “Jon?” he said.
    He sounded small and faraway and echoey. I imagined him on a pay phone halfway down a long corridor.
    “Yes, hello, Tony,” I said, in a no-nonsense way.
    “I haven’t heard from you in a while,” said Tony.
    He sounded like a child whose parents had suddenly started acting frostily for no obvious reason.
    “Professor Maden says you’re a psychopath,” I said.
    Tony exhaled impatiently.
    “I’m not a psychopath,” he said.
    There was a short silence.
    “How do you know?” I asked.
    “They say psychopaths can’t feel remorse,” said Tony. “I feel lots of remorse. But when I tell them I feel remorse, they say psychopaths pretend to be remorseful when they’re not.” Tony paused. “It’s like witchcraft,” he said. “They turn everything upside down.”
    “What makes them believe you’re a psychopath?” I said.
    “Ah,” said Tony. “Back in 1998 when I was faking mental illness, I stupidly included some fake psychopathic stuff in there. Like Ted Bundy. Remember I plagiarized a Ted Bundy book? Ted Bundy was definitely a