The Alienist

CHAPTER 5

The closer the church, the nearer to God,” was how one gangland wit had put his decision to base his criminal operations within a few blocks of Police Headquarters. The statement could have been made by any one of dozens of like characters, for the northern terminus of Mulberry Street at Bleecker (headquarters was located at Number 300) marked the heart of a jungle of tenements, brothels, concert halls, saloons, and gambling houses. One group of girls who staffed a disorderly house directly across Bleecker Street from 300 Mulberry made great sport, during their few idle hours, of sitting in the house’s green-shuttered windows and watching the doings at headquarters through opera glasses, then offering commentary to passing police officials. That was the sort of carnival atmosphere that surrounded the place. Or perhaps one should rather say that it was a circus, and a brutal Roman one at that—for several times a day, bleeding victims of crime or wounded perpetrators of it would be dragged into the rather nondescript, hotel-like structure that was the busy brain of New York’s law enforcement arm, leaving a sticky, grim reminder of the deadly nature of the building’s business on the pavement outside.

Across Mulberry Street, at Number 303, was the unofficial headquarters of the police reporters: a simple stoop where I and my colleagues spent much of our time, waiting for word of a story. It was therefore not surprising that Riis and Steffens should have been awaiting my arrival. Riis’s anxious manner and the gleeful grin that dominated Steffens’s gaunt, handsome features indicated that something particularly tasty was up.

“Well, well!” Steffens said, raising his umbrella as he jumped onto the running board of Kreizler’s carriage. “The mystery guests arrive together! Good morning, Dr. Kreizler, a pleasure to see you, sir.”

“Steffens,” Kreizler answered with a nod that was not entirely congenial.

Riis came huffing up behind Steffens, his hulking Danish frame not so lithe as that of the much younger Steffens. “Doctor,” he said, to which Kreizler only nodded. He had a positive dislike for Riis; the Dane’s pioneering work in revealing the evils of tenement life—most notably through his collection of essays and pictures called How the Other Half Lives—did not change the fact that he was a strident moralist and something of a bigot, so far as Kreizler was concerned. And I have to admit, I often saw Laszlo’s point. “Moore,” Riis went on, “Roosevelt has just thrown us out of his office, saying he is expecting the both of you for an important consultation—some very strange game is being played here, I think!”

“Don’t listen to him,” Steffens said with another laugh. “His pride’s bruised. It seems that there’s been another murder which, because of our friend Riis’s personal beliefs, will never make the pages of the Evening Sun—we’ve all been riding him rather shamelessly, I’m afraid!”

“Steffens, by God, if you keep at me—” Riis balled up a healthy Scandinavian hand and waved the fist in Steffens’s direction as he kept breathing hard and jogging along, trying to keep up with the still-rolling carriage. As Cyrus reined the gelding to a halt outside headquarters, Steffens jumped down.

“Come now, Jake, no threats!” he said good-naturedly. “This is all in fun!”

“What in hell are you two talking about?” I said, as Kreizler, trying to ignore the scene, stepped from the carriage.

“Now, don’t play stupid,” Steffens answered. “You’ve seen the body, and so has Dr. Kreizler—we know that much. But unfortunately, since Jake chooses to deny the reality of both boy-whores and the houses in which they work, he can’t report the story!”

Riis huffed again, his big face getting redder. “Steffens, I’ll teach you—”

“And since we know your editors won’t print such seamy stuff, John,” Steffens went on, “I’m afraid that leaves the Post—how about it, Dr. Kreizler? Care to give the details to the only paper in town that’ll print them?”

Kreizler’s mouth curled into a slight smile that was neither gentle nor amused, but somehow deprecating. “The only, Steffens? What about the World, or the Journal?”

“Ah, I should have been more precise—the only respectable paper in town that will print them.”

Kreizler only ran his eyes up and down Steffens’s lanky figure. “Respectable,” he echoed with a shake of his head, and then he was going up the stairs.

“Say what you like, Doctor,” Steffens called after him, still smiling, “but you’ll get a fairer shake from us than from Hearst or Pulitzer!” Kreizler did not acknowledge the comment. “We understand you examined the killer this morning,” Steffens pressed. “Would you at least talk about that?”

Pausing at the door, Kreizler turned. “The man I examined was indeed a killer. But he has nothing to do with the Santorelli boy.”

“Really? Well, you might want to let Detective Sergeant Connor know that. He’s been telling us all morning that Wolff got crazed for blood by shooting the little girl and went out looking for another victim.”

“What?” Genuine alarm was in Kreizler’s face. “No—no, he mustn’t—it is absolutely vital that he not do that!”

Laszlo bolted inside just as Steffens made a final attempt to get him to talk. With his quarry now gone, my colleague from the Evening Post put his free hand to his hip, his smile shrinking just a bit. “You know, John—that man’s attitude doesn’t win him many admirers.”

“It’s not intended to,” I said, starting up the steps. Steffens grabbed my arm.

“Can’t you tell us anything, John? It’s not like Roosevelt to keep Jake and me out of police business—hell, we’re more members of the Board of Commissioners than those fools who sit with him.”

That was true: Roosevelt had often consulted both Riis and Steffens on questions of policy. Nonetheless, I could only shrug. “If I knew anything, I’d tell you, Link. They’ve kept me in the dark, too.”

“But the body, Moore,” Riis chimed in. “We have heard ungodly rumors—surely they are false!”

Thinking for just a moment of the corpse on the bridge anchor, I sighed. “However ungodly the rumors, boys, they can’t begin to describe it.” With that I turned and strode up the steps.

Before I was inside the door Riis and Steffens were at it again, Steffens pelting his friend with sarcastic barbs and Riis angrily trying to shut him up. But Link was right, even if he expressed himself somewhat meanly: Riis’s stubborn insistence that homosexual prostitution did not exist meant that another of the city’s largest papers would never acknowledge the full details of a brutal murder. And how much more the report would have meant coming from Riis than from Steffens; for while most of Link’s important work as an exponent of the Progressive movement lay in the future, Riis was long since an established voice of authority, the man whose angry declamations had caused the razing of Mulberry Bend (the very heart of New York’s most notorious slum, Five Points) along with the destruction of many other pestilential pockets. Yet Jake could not bring himself to fully acknowledge the Santorelli murder; despite all the horrors he had witnessed, he could not accept the circumstances of such a crime; and as I entered the big green doors of headquarters I wondered, just as I had wondered a thousand times during staff meetings at the Times, how long many members of the press—not to mention politicians and the public—would be content to equate deliberate ignorance of evil with its nonexistence.

Inside I found Kreizler standing near the caged elevator, talking heatedly with Connor, the detective who had been at the murder scene the previous night. I was about to join them when my arm was taken and I was guided toward a staircase by one of the more pleasant sights available at headquarters: Sara Howard, an old friend of mine.

“Don’t get involved in that, John,” she said, with a tone of sage wisdom that often marked her statements. “Connor is taking a lashing from your friend, and he deserves the full treatment. Besides, the president wants you upstairs—sans Dr. Kreizler.”

“Sara!” I said happily. “I am glad to see you. I’ve spent a night and a morning with maniacs. I need the sound of a sane voice.”

Sara’s taste in dresses ran toward simple designs in shades of green that matched her eyes, and the one she wore that day, with only a minimal bustle and not much petticoat business, showed off her tall, athletic body to advantage. Her face was by no means striking but handsomely plain; it was the play of eyes and mouth, back and forth between mischievous and sad, that made it such a delight to watch her. Back in the early seventies, when I was in my teens, her family moved into a house near ours on Gramercy Park, and I’d subsequently watched her spend her single-digit years turning that decorous neighborhood into her private rumpus room. Time had not changed her much, except to make her as thoughtful (and occasionally brooding) as she was excitable; and following the demise of my engagement to Julia Pratt I had one night gotten more than a little drunk, decided that all women held by society to be beauties were in fact demons, and asked Sara to marry me. Her answer was to take me in a cab to the Hudson River and throw me in.

“You won’t find many sane voices in this building today,” Sara said as we climbed the stairs. “Teddy—that is, the president—isn’t it strange to call him that, John?” And indeed it was; but when Roosevelt was at headquarters, which was ruled by a board of four commissioners of which he was chief, he was distinguished from the other three by the title “president.” Very few of us guessed at the time that he would answer to an identical title in the none-too-distant future. “Well, he’s been in one of his whirlwinds over the Santorelli case. Every kind of person has been in and out—”

Just then Theodore’s voice came booming down from the second-story hallway: “And don’t bother bringing your friends at Tammany into this, Kelly! Tammany is a monstrous Democrat creation, and this is a reform Republican administration—you’ve earned no favors here with your shoulder-hitting! I advise you to cooperate!” Deep chuckles from a pair of voices inside the staircase were the only reply to this, and the sounds were moving our way. Within seconds Sara and I were face-to-face with the foppishly dressed, cologne-drenched, enormous figure of Biff Ellison, as well as his smaller, more tastefully clad, and less aromatic criminal overseer, Paul Kelly.

The days when Lower Manhattan’s underworld affairs were parceled out among dozens of freewheeling street gangs had for the most part come to an end by 1896, and dealings had been taken over and consolidated by larger groups that were just as deadly but far more businesslike in their approach. The Eastmans, named for their colorful chief, Monk Eastman, controlled all territory east of the Bowery between Fourteenth Street and Chatham Square; on the West Side, the Hudson Dusters, darlings of many New York intellectuals and artists (largely because they all shared a seemingly insatiable appetite for cocaine), ran affairs south of Thirteenth Street and west of Broadway; the area above Fourteenth Street on that side of town belonged to Mallet Murphy’s Gophers, a group of cellar-dwelling Irish creatures whose evolution even Mr. Darwin would have been hard-pressed to explain; and between these three virtual armies, at the eye of the criminal hurricane and just blocks from Police Headquarters, were Paul Kelly and his Five Pointers, who ruled supreme between Broadway and the Bowery and from Fourteenth Street to City Hall.

Kelly’s gang had been named after the city’s toughest neighborhood in an attempt to inspire fear, though in reality they were far less anarchic in their dealings than the classic Five Points bands of an earlier generation (the Whyos, Plug Uglies, Dead Rabbits, and the rest), remnants of which still haunted their old neighborhood like violent, disaffected ghosts. Kelly himself was reflective of this change in style: his sartorial acumen was matched by polished speech and manners. He also possessed a thorough knowledge of art and politics, his taste in the former running toward modern and in the latter toward socialism. But Kelly knew his customers, too; and tasteful was not the word to describe the New Brighton Dance Hall, the Five Pointers’ headquarters on Great Jones Street. Overseen by a singular giant known as Eat-’Em-Up Jack McManus, the New Brighton was a garish mass of mirrors, crystal chandeliers, brass railings, and scantily clad “dancers,” a flash palace unequaled even in the Tenderloin, which, before Kelly’s rise, had been the unquestioned center of outlaw opulence.

James T. “Biff” Ellison, on the other hand, represented the more traditional sort of New York thug. He had begun his career as a particularly unsavory saloon bouncer, and had first gained notoriety by beating and stomping a police officer nearly to death. Though he aspired to his boss’s polish, on Ellison—ignorant, sexually depraved, and drug-ridden as he was—the attempt became grotesquely ostentatious. Kelly had murderous lieutenants whose doings were infamous and even daring, but none save Ellison would have dared to open Paresis Hall, one of the mere three or four saloons in New York that openly—indeed, exuberantly—catered to that segment of society which Jake Riis so assiduously refused to believe existed.

“Well, now,” Kelly said amiably, the stud in his cravat gleaming as he approached, “it’s Mr. Moore of the Times—along with one of the lovely new ladies of the Police Department.” Taking Sara’s hand, Kelly lowered his chiseled, Black Irish features and kissed it. “It certainly is more enjoyable getting summoned to headquarters these days.” His smile as he stared at Sara was well practiced and confident; none of which changed the fact that the air in the staircase had suddenly become charged with oppressive threat.

“Mr. Kelly,” Sara answered with a brave nod, though I could see that she was quite nervous. “A pity your charm isn’t matched by the company you choose to keep.”

Kelly laughed, but Ellison, who already towered over Sara and me, rose up even higher, his fleshy face and ferret’s eyes darkening. “It’d be best to watch your mouth, missy—it’s a long walk from headquarters to Gramercy Park. A lot of unpleasant things could happen to a girl all alone.”

“You’re a real rabbit, aren’t you, Ellison?” I said, although the man could have broken me in half without much thought. “What’s the matter—run out of little boys to push around, you need to start on women?”

Ellison’s face went positively red. “Why, you miserable piece of scribbling shit—sure, Gloria was trouble, a whole bundle of trouble, but I wouldn’t a cooked her for it, and I’ll kill any man says I—”

“Now, now, Biff.” Kelly’s tone was pleasant, but his meaning was unmistakable: Knock it off. “There’s no cause for any of that.” And then to me: “Biff had nothing to do with the boy’s murder, Moore. And I don’t want to see my name connected with it, either.”

“Hell of a time to think of that, Kelly,” I answered. “I saw his body—it was worthy of Biff, all right.” In fact, not even Ellison had ever done anything so horrendous, but there was no reason to acknowledge that to them. “He was just a boy.”

Kelly chuckled as he took a few steps farther down the stairs. “Yes, and a boy playing a dangerous game. Come on, Moore, boys like that die every day in this town—why the interest? Did he have a secret relative somewhere? A bastard kid of Morgan’s or Frick’s?”

“Do you think that’s the only reason the case would be investigated?” Sara asked, somewhat offended—she hadn’t been working at headquarters very long.

“My dear girl,” Kelly answered, “both Mr. Moore and I know that’s the only reason. But have it your way—Roosevelt is championing the benighted!” Kelly continued down the stairs, and Ellison pushed by me to follow. They paused a little farther down and then Kelly turned, his voice for the first time hinting at his occupation. “But I warn you, Moore—I do not want to see my name connected with this.”

“Don’t worry, Kelly. My editors would never run the story.”

He smiled again. “Very sensible of them, too. There are momentous things going on in the world, Moore—why waste energy on a trifle?”

With that they were gone, and Sara and I collected ourselves. Kelly may have been a new breed of gangster, but he was a gangster all the same, and our encounter had been genuinely unsettling.

“Do you know,” Sara said thoughtfully as we started upstairs again, “that my friend Emily Cort went slumming one night specifically to meet Paul Kelly—and that she found him the most entertaining man? But then, Emily always was an empty-headed little fool.” She took hold of my arm. “By the way, John, why in the world did you call Mr. Ellison a rabbit? He’s more like an ape.”

“In the language he speaks, a rabbit is a tough customer.”

“Oh. I must remember to write that down. I want my knowledge of the criminal class to be as thorough as possible.”

I could only laugh. “Sara—with all the professions open to women these days, why do you insist on this one? Smart as you are, you could be a scientist, a doctor, even—”

“So could you, John,” she answered sharply. “Except that you don’t happen to want to. And, by way of coincidence, neither do I. Honestly, sometimes you are the most idiotic man. You know perfectly well what I want.” And so did every other friend of Sara’s: to be the city’s first female police officer.

“But, Sara, are you any closer to your goal? You’re only a secretary, after all.”

She smiled wisely, with a hint of that same tense sharpness behind the smile. “Yes, John—but I’m in the building, aren’t I? Ten years ago that would have been impossible.”

I nodded with a shrug, aware that it was useless to argue with her, and then looked around the second-floor hallway in an attempt to find a familiar face. But the detectives and officers that came from and went to the various rooms were all new to me. “Hell’s bells,” I said quietly, “I don’t recognize anyone up here today.”

“Yes, it’s gotten worse. We lost a dozen more last month. They’d all rather resign or retire than face investigation.”

“But Theodore can’t staff the whole force with googoos.” Such being the colloquial term for new officers.

“So everyone says. But if the choice is between corruption and inexperience, you know which way he’ll go.” Sara gave me a firm push in the back. “Oh, do stop dawdling, John, he wanted you right away.” We wove through uniformed leatherheads and “fly cops” (officers dressed in civilian clothing) until we were at the end of the hall. “And later,” Sara added, “you must explain to me exactly why it is that cases like this one are not usually investigated.” Then, in a flurry, she rapped on the door of Theodore’s office, opened it, and kept on shoving me till I was through. “Mr. Moore, Commissioner,” she announced, closing the door and leaving me inside.

Voluminous reader and writer that he was, Theodore had a penchant for massive desks, and his office at headquarters was dominated by one. A few armchairs were crowded around it uncomfortably. A tall clock sat atop the white mantel of the fireplace, and there was a shiny brass telephone on a small side table; otherwise the only items in the room were stacks of books and papers, some resting on the floor and going halfway up to the ceiling. The shades on the windows, which faced out onto Mulberry Street, were drawn halfway down and Theodore stood before one of them, wearing a very conservative gray suit for the business day.

“Ah, John, excellent,” he said, hustling around the desk and then mangling my hand. “Kreizler’s downstairs?”

“Yes. You wanted to see me alone?”

Theodore paced about in a mix of serious yet merry anticipation. “What’s his mood? How will he respond, do you think? He’s such a tempestuous fellow—I want to make sure I take the right tack with him.”

I shrugged. “He’s all right, I suppose. We were up at Bellevue seeing this Wolff character, the one who shot the little girl, and he was in a hell of a mood after that. But he worked it out during the ride down—on my ears. However, Roosevelt, since I have no idea what it is you want him for—”

Just then there was another quick, light knock on the door, and then Sara reappeared. She was followed by Kreizler: they had evidently been chatting, and as their conversation faded away inside the office I noticed that Laszlo was studying her intently. At the time this didn’t seem particularly remarkable; it was how most people reacted to finding a woman employed at headquarters.

Theodore got between them in a flash. “Kreizler!” he clicked loudly. “Delighted, Doctor, delighted to see you!”

“Roosevelt,” Kreizler answered with a genuinely pleased smile. “It’s been a long while.”

“Too long, too long! Shall we sit and talk, or shall I have the office cleared so that we can enjoy a rematch?”

It was a reference to their first encounter at Harvard, which had involved a boxing match; and as we laughed and sat, the ice very nicely broken, my thoughts drifted back to those days.

Though I’d known Theodore for many years before his arrival at Harvard as a freshman in 1876, I’d never been very close to him. In addition to being sickly, he’d been a studious and generally well-behaved boy, whereas both I and my younger brother had spent our youths ensuring that anarchy reigned as much as possible on the streets of our Gramercy Park neighborhood. “Ringleaders” was a label my brother and I were usually given by our parents’ friends, and there was much talk about the remarkable misfortune of one family being afflicted with two black sheep. In reality there was nothing very evil or malicious in what we did; it was more that we chose to do it in the company of a small band of boys whose homes were the back alleys and doorways of the Gas House district to the east of us. Such were not considered acceptable playmates in our staid little corner of Knickerbocker society, where class counted for much and no adult was prepared to tolerate children with minds of their own. A few years away at preparatory school did nothing to discourage my tendencies; indeed, so great had the general alarm over my behavior grown by my seventeenth birthday that my application for admission to Harvard was almost rejected, a fate I would gladly have accepted. But my father’s deep pockets swung the balance back in my supposed favor and off I went to the stultifying little village of Cambridge, where a year or two of college life did absolutely nothing to make me more inclined to accept a young scholar like Theodore when he arrived.

But in the fall of 1877, during my senior and Theodore’s sophomore year, all this began to change. Laboring under the twin burdens of a difficult romance and a gravely ill father, Theodore began to develop from a rather narrow youth into a much more broad-minded and accessible young man. He never became anything like a man of the world, of course; but we nonetheless managed to discover philosophical dimensions in each other that allowed us to pass a good many evenings drinking and talking together. Soon we were conducting expeditions into Boston society, both high and low; and on that foundation a solid friendship began to grow.

Meanwhile, another childhood friend of mine, Laszlo Kreizler, having earlier completed an unprecedentedly quick course of study at the Columbia Medical College, had been drawn away from a job as a junior assistant at the Lunatic Asylum on Blackwells Island by a new graduate course in psychology offered at Harvard by Dr. William James. That gregarious, terrier-like professor, who would go on to fame as a philosopher, had recently established America’s first psychological laboratory in a few small rooms in Lawrence Hall. He also taught comparative anatomy to undergraduates; and in the fall 1877 term, having heard that James was an amusing professor who was sympathetic when it came to grades, I signed up for his course. On the first day I found myself sitting next to Theodore, who was pursuing the interest in all things wild that had consumed him since early youth. Although Roosevelt often got into spirited discussions over some minor point of animal behavior with James, he, like all of us, quickly became charmed by the still-young professor, who had a habit of reclining on the floor when his students’ participation was flagging and declaring that teaching was “a mutual process.”

Kreizler’s relationship with James was far more complex. Though he greatly respected James’s work and grew to have enormous affection for the man himself (it really was impossible not to), Laszlo was nonetheless unable to accept James’s famous theories on free will, which were the cornerstone of our teacher’s philosophy. James had been a maudlin, unhealthy boy, and as a young man had more than once contemplated suicide; but he overcame this tendency as a result of reading the works of the French philosopher Renouvier, who taught that a man could, by force of will, overcome all psychic (and many physical) ailments. “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will!” had been James’s early battle cry, an attitude that continued to dominate his thinking in 1877. Such a philosophy was bound to collide with Kreizler’s developing belief in what he called “context”: the theory that every man’s actions are to a very decisive extent influenced by his early experiences, and that no man’s behavior can be analyzed or affected without knowledge of those experiences. In the laboratory rooms at Lawrence Hall, which were filled with devices for testing and dissecting animal nervous systems and human reactions, James and Kreizler battled over how the patterns of people’s lives are formed and whether or not any of us is free to determine what kind of lives we will lead as adults. These encounters became steadily more heated—not to mention a subject of campus gossip—until finally, one night early in the second term, they debated in University Hall the question “Is Free Will a Psychological Phenomenon?”

Most of the student body attended; and though Kreizler argued well, the crowd was predisposed to dismiss his statements. In addition, James’s sense of humor was far more developed than Kreizler’s at that time, and the boys at Harvard enjoyed their professor’s many jokes at Kreizler’s expense. On the other hand, Laszlo’s references to philosophers of gloom, such as the German Schopenhauer, as well as his reliance on the evolutionist theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer in explaining that survival was the goal of man’s mental as much as his physical development, provoked many and prolonged groans of undergraduate disapproval. I confess that even I was torn, between loyalty to a friend whose beliefs had always made me uneasy and enthusiasm for a man and a philosophy that seemed to offer the promise of limitless possibilities for not only my own but every man’s future. Theodore—who did not yet know Kreizler, and who had, like James, survived many and severe childhood illnesses by dint of what he reasoned to be sheer willpower—was not troubled by any such qualms: he spiritedly cheered James’s eventual and inevitable victory.

I dined with Kreizler after the debate in a tavern across the Charles that was frequented by Harvardians. In the middle of our meal Theodore entered with some friends and, seeing me with Kreizler, requested an introduction. He made some good-natured but pointed remarks about Laszlo’s “mystical mumbo jumbo concerning the human psyche” and how it was all the result of his European background; but he went too far when he spouted a jibe about “gypsy blood,” for Laszlo’s mother was Hungarian and he took great offense. Kreizler laid down the challenge for an affair of honor, and Theodore delightedly took him up, suggesting a boxing match. I knew Laszlo would have preferred fencing foils—with his bad left arm he stood little chance in a ring—but he agreed, in keeping with the code duello, which gave Theodore, as the challenged party, the choice of weapons.

To Roosevelt’s credit, when the two men had stripped to their waists in the Hemenway Gymnasium (entered, at that late hour, by way of a set of keys I had won from a custodian in a poker game earlier in the year) and saw Kreizler’s arm, he offered to let him choose some weapon other than fists; but Kreizler was stubborn and proud, and though he was, for the second time in the same evening, predestined for defeat, he put up a far better fight than anyone had expected. His gameness impressed all present and, predictably, won him Roosevelt’s heartfelt admiration. We all returned to the tavern and drank until the late hours; and though Theodore and Laszlo never became the most intimate of friends, a very special bond had been formed between them, one that opened Roosevelt’s mind—if only a crack—to Kreizler’s theories and opinions.

That opening was a good part of the reason we were now collected in Theodore’s office; and as we talked of the old days in Cambridge, our immediate business receded for a time. The conversation soon spread to the more recent past, Roosevelt asking some genuinely interested questions about Kreizler’s work with both the children at his Institute and the criminally insane, and Laszlo saying that he had followed Theodore’s career as an assemblyman in Albany and a civil service commissioner in Washington with great interest. It was pleasant talk among old friends who had a great deal of catching up to do, and for much of the time I was content to sit back and listen, enjoying the change of atmosphere from the previous night and morning.

But inevitably, the conversation turned to the Santorelli murder; and a sense of foreboding and sadness crept relentlessly into the room, dissipating pleasant memories as cruelly as some unknown savage had dispatched the boy on the bridge tower.