The Alienist

CHAPTER 7

We were anxious to begin marshalling our forces for the investigation, and the delays we experienced, though brief, were frustrating. When Theodore got wind of the speculative interest in Kreizler’s visit to headquarters displayed by reporters and police officers, he realized that he’d made a mistake by holding the meeting there, and told us he needed a couple of days to get things calmed down. Kreizler and I used the time to make arrangements regarding our “civilian” occupations. I had to convince my editors to grant me a leave of absence, a goal made somewhat easier by a timely telephone call from Roosevelt, who explained that I was wanted on vital police business. Nonetheless, I was only allowed out of the editorial offices of the Times at Thirty-second and Broadway when I pledged that if the investigation resulted in a story that was fit to print, I would not take it to another paper or magazine, regardless of how much money I was offered. I assured my sour-faced taskmasters that they wouldn’t want the story anyway, and then breezed down Broadway on a typical March morning in New York: twenty-nine degrees at eleven A.M., with winds of fifty miles an hour cutting through the streets. I was scheduled to meet Kreizler at his Institute, and I had thought to walk, so great was my sense of release at not being answerable to my editors for an indefinite period. But real New York cold—the kind that freezes horse urine in little rivulets on the surface of the streets—will conquer the best of spirits eventually. Outside the Fifth Avenue Hotel I decided to get a cab, pausing only to watch Boss Platt emerge from a carriage and vanish inside, his stiff, unnatural movements doing nothing to reassure the onlooker that he was, in fact, alive.

Kreizler’s leave of absence, I speculated inside the cab, would not be so simple a matter as mine. The two dozen or so children at his Institute depended on his presence and his counsel, having come to him from homes (or streets) where they were either habitually ignored, regularly chastised, or actively beaten. Indeed, I had not initially seen how he proposed to take up another vocation, even temporarily, so great was the need for his steadying hand at the Institute; but then he told me that he still planned to spend two mornings and one night per week there, at which times he would leave our investigation in my hands. It was not the kind of responsibility I’d anticipated, and I was surprised when the notion left me feeling eager rather than anxious.

Shortly after my cab passed through Chatham Square and turned onto East Broadway, I disembarked at Numbers 185–187: the Kreizler Institute. Stepping onto the sidewalk, I saw that Laszlo’s calash was also at the curb, and I glanced up at the windows of the Institute, half-expecting to see him looking out for me but finding no face.

Kreizler had bought the Institute’s two four-story, red-brick and black-trim buildings with his own money in 1885, and then had their interiors remodeled so that they became one unit. The subsequent upkeep of the place was covered by the fee he charged his wealthier clients, as well as by the considerable income he took in from his work as an expert legal witness. The children’s rooms were on the top floor of the Institute, and class and recreational halls occupied the third. On the second floor were Kreizler’s consulting and examination rooms, as well as his psychological laboratory, where he performed tests on the children’s powers of perception, reaction, association, memory, and all the other psychic functions that so fascinated the alienist community. The ground floor was reserved for his rather forbidding operational theater, where he performed the occasional brain dissection and post-mortem. My cab had pulled up near the black iron stairs that led to the main entrance, at Number 185, and Cyrus Montrose was at the top of them, his head housed in a bowler, his huge frame enveloped in an even more sizable greatcoat, and his wide nostrils breathing cool fire.

“Afternoon, Cyrus,” I said with a difficult smile as I climbed the stairs, vainly hoping that I didn’t sound as uneasy as I always felt when caught in his shark’s stare. “Is Dr. Kreizler here?”

“That’s his carriage, Mr. Moore,” Cyrus answered, in a pleasant enough voice that still managed to make me sound like one of the bigger idiots in the city. But I just grinned resolutely on.

“I expect you’ve heard that the doctor and I will be working together for a while?”

Cyrus nodded with what, if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn was a wry smile. “I’ve heard, sir.”

“Well!” I brushed my jacket back and slapped at my vest. “I guess I’ll go find him. Afternoon, Cyrus!”

I got no answer from the man as I entered, not that I deserved one; there was no reason for both of us to behave like morons.

The Institute’s small vestibule and front hall—white with dark wood wainscoting—were full of the usual fathers, mothers, and children, all crowded onto two long, low benches and waiting to see Kreizler. Almost every morning in the late winter and early spring, Laszlo personally conducted interviews to determine who would be admitted to the Institute the following fall. The applicants ranged from the wealthiest northeastern families to the poorest of immigrants and rural laborers, but they all had one thing in common: a troubled or troublesome child whose behavior was in some way extreme and inexplicable. This was all very serious, of course, but that didn’t change the fact that the Institute was, on such mornings, a bit of a zoo. As you walked down the hallway you were likely to be tripped, spat at, cursed, and otherwise maltreated, particularly by those children whose only mental deficiency was that they’d been overindulged, and whose parents clearly could and should have saved themselves the trip to Kreizler’s office.

As I moved to the door of Kreizler’s consulting room, I locked gazes with one such prospective troublemaker, a fat little boy with malevolent eyes. A dark, heavily lined woman of about fifty, wrapped in a shawl and mumbling something that I suspected was Hungarian, was pacing back and forth in front of the consulting room door; I had to dodge both her and the fat boy’s kicking legs in order to get close enough to knock. Having done so I heard Kreizler shout “Yes!” and then I entered, the pacing woman watching me with apparent concern.

After the fairly innocuous vestibule, Laszlo’s consulting room was the first place that his prospective patients (whom he always referred to as “students,” insisting that his staff do the same in order to avoid making the children conscious of their situations and conditions) saw on entering the space and experience that were the Kreizler Institute. He had therefore taken care that its furnishings were not intimidating. There were paintings of animals that, while reflecting Laszlo’s good taste, nonetheless amused and reassured the children, as did the presence of toys—ball-and-cup, simple building blocks, dolls, and lead soldiers—which Laszlo actually used in making preliminary tests of agility, reaction time, and emotional disposition. The presence of medical instruments was minimal, most being kept in the examination room beyond. It was there that Kreizler would perform his first series of physical investigations, should a given case interest him. These tests were designed to determine whether the child’s difficulties stemmed from secondary causes (that is, bodily malfunctions that affected mood and behavior) or primary abnormalities, meaning mental or emotional disorders. If a child showed no evidence of secondary distress, and Kreizler thought he could do some good in the case (in other words, if there were no signs of hopeless brain disease or damage), the child would be “enrolled”: he or she would live at the Institute nearly full-time, going home only for holidays, and then only if Kreizler thought such contact safe. Laszlo very much agreed with the theories of his friend and colleague Dr. Adolf Meyer, and often quoted one of Meyer’s dictums: “The degenerative processes in children have their chief encouragement in the equally defective home surroundings.” Allowing troubled children a new environmental context was the most important goal of the Institute; and beyond that, it was the cornerstone of Laszlo’s passionate effort to discover whether or not what he called the “original mold” of the human psyche could be recast and the fate to which the accidents of birth consign each of us thereby redetermined.

Kreizler was sitting at his rather ornate secretary, writing by the light of a small Tiffany desk lamp of muted green and gold glass. Waiting for him to look up, I approached a small bookshelf near the secretary and took down one of my favorite volumes: The Career and Death of the Mad Thief and Murderer, Samuel Green. The case, dating from 1822, was one that Laszlo often cited to the parents of his “students,” for the infamous Green had been, in Kreizler’s words, “a product of the whip”—beaten throughout his childhood—and at the time of his capture had openly acknowledged that his crimes against society were a form of revenge. My own attraction to the book was prompted by its frontispiece, which depicted “The Madman Green’s End” on a Boston gallows. I had always enjoyed Green’s crazed stare in the picture, and was amusedly reacquainting myself with it when Kreizler, without turning from his desk, thrust out a few sheets of paper and said:

“Look at these, Moore. Our first success, small though it is.”

Putting the book aside and taking the papers from him, I found that they were a series of forms and releases that seemed to refer to a graveyard, and to two graves in particular; there was a note concerning exhumation of bodies, and a nearly illegible document signed by one Abraham Zweig—

I was distracted by the unmistakable feeling of being watched. Turning, I saw a young girl of about twelve, with a round, pretty face that bore a somewhat frightened and slightly persecuted expression. She had taken up the book I’d laid down, and was glancing from me to the frontispiece as she fixed the top few buttons of a simple but clean dress. She read the small legend that explained the engraving, and apparently leapt to some unpleasant conclusions—her face grew fearful and she looked to Kreizler, while shying away from me.

Laszlo turned to her. “Ah, Berthe. Ready to leave?”

The girl pointed at the book uncertainly, then spoke in a tremor as she turned her finger on me: “Then…am I mad, too, Dr. Kreizler? And is this man going to put me in one of those places?”

“What?” Kreizler answered, taking the book away and giving me an admonishing look. “Mad? Ridiculous! We have only good news.” Laszlo spoke to her as to any adult—directly, bluntly—but with a tone that he reserved for children: patient, kind, occasionally indulgent. “Come right over here.” The girl approached him, and Kreizler helped her jump onto his knee. “You are a very healthy, very intelligent young lady.” The girl blushed and laughed, quietly and happily. “Your difficulty stems from a series of small growths that are living in your nose and ears. These growths, unlike you, enjoy the fact that your house is too blasted cold.” He tapped her head in time with these last words. “You shall have to see a doctor, who is a friend of mine, and have these growths removed. All of which can be done while you’re having a very pleasant sleep. And as for this man”—he put Berthe back on the floor—“he is my friend, Mr. Moore. Say hello.”

The girl curtsied ever so slightly, but did not speak. I bowed back. “Very pleased to meet you, Berthe.”

She only laughed again, at which Laszlo made a ticking noise. “Enough of your giggling. Go and fetch your mother and we’ll arrange everything.”

The girl ran to the door and Kreizler tapped the papers in my hand with some excitement. “Fast work, eh, Moore? They arrived here not an hour ago.”

“Who did?” I asked in bewilderment. “What did?”

“The Zweig children!” he answered quietly. “The ones in the water tower—I have their remains downstairs!”

It was so ghoulish a notion, and one so at odds with the rest of the activity in the Institute that day, that I couldn’t help but shudder. Before I could ask why in the world he should have done such a thing, however, the girl Berthe had brought her mother—the woman with the shawl—into the office. The woman exchanged a few words in Hungarian with Kreizler, but his knowledge of that language was limited (his German father had not wished his children to speak their mother’s tongue) and the conversation soon shifted back to English.

“Mrs. Rajk, you really must listen to me!” Laszlo said, exasperated.

“But, Doctor,” the woman protested, wringing her hands, “sometimes, you see, she understands good, and then I know she is being like a demon, tormenting us—”

“Mrs. Rajk, I’m not certain how many different ways I can explain this to you,” Kreizler said, making one more attempt at evenhandedness as he pulled his silver watch from his vest pocket and quickly looked at it. “Or in how many languages. The swelling is occasionally less marked, you see?” He pointed at his own ear, nose, and throat. “At such times she is in no pain, and can not only hear and speak but breathe easily. So she is alert and attentive. But most of the time the vegetations in the pharynx and the posterior nasal cavity—the throat, the nose—cover the eustachian tubes, connected to her ears, and generally make such an effort difficult, if not impossible. The fact that your flat is full of cold drafts aggravates the condition.” Kreizler put his hands on the young girl’s shoulders, and she smiled happily again. “In short, she is not doing any of this deliberately to torment either you or her instructor. Do you understand?” He leaned down into the mother’s face, giving her a close examination with the hawk’s eyes. “No. Obviously you do not. Well, then, you must simply accept my statement—there is nothing wrong with her mind or her soul. Take her to St. Luke’s. Dr. Osborne performs these procedures quite regularly, and I believe I can persuade him to lower his fee. By next fall”—he tousled the girl’s hair, and she looked up at him gratefully—“Berthe will be more than recovered and quite ready to excel at school. Correct, young lady?”

The girl didn’t answer, but let out another little laugh. The mother tried one more “But—” before Kreizler took her by the arm and hustled her out through the vestibule to the front door. “Really, Mrs. Rajk, that is enough. The fact that you cannot understand it does not mean that it doesn’t exist. Take her to Dr. Osborne! I shall consult with him, and if I find you have not obeyed me I shall be extremely angry.” He closed the front door on them, turned back into the vestibule, and was immediately besieged by the remaining families. Shouting an announcement that there would be a short break in the interviewing, Kreizler retreated into the consulting room again and slammed the door.

“The great difficulty,” he mumbled, as he returned to his secretary and began straightening papers, “of convincing people that the mental health of children must be better attended to is that more and more of them believe that their child’s every little trouble betrays a momentous condition. Ah, well…” He closed the secretary and locked it, then turned. “Now, Moore. Down we go. Roosevelt’s men should already be here. I asked Cyrus to bring them in directly through the ground-floor door.”

“You’re going to interview them here?” I asked, as we went through the examination room and escaped the families out front by way of a back door to the Institute’s courtyard.

“In fact, I am not going to interview them at all,” Kreizler answered, as the cold air hit us. “I will allow the Zweig children to do that. I will only study the results. And remember, Moore—not a word about what we’re doing, until I’m sure these men are acceptable.”

It had begun to snow lightly, and several of Kreizler’s young patients—dressed in the Institute’s simple gray and blue uniform, whose purpose was to help prevent differing economic backgrounds from creating friction between the children—had come out into the courtyard to play among the flakes. When they saw Kreizler they ran over to cheerfully but very respectfully greet him. Laszlo smiled back at them, and asked a few questions about their teachers and their schoolwork. A couple of the bolder students gave some frank answers about this or that teacher’s appearance and bodily aromas, at which Laszlo admonished them, though not harshly. As we turned away and entered the ground-floor doorway, I heard joyful shouts start to echo off the courtyard walls once more, and thought of how recently many of these children had been on the streets and just a few short steps from Giorgio Santorelli’s fate. More and more, my mind was seeing all things in relation to the case.

A dark, dank hallway led us to the operating theater, a very long room that was kept dry and warm by a gas space heater that hissed in one corner. The walls were smooth and whitewashed, and white cabinets with glass doors ran along each wall, holding a collection of gruesome, glistening instruments. On white shelves above these were a collection of chilling models: realistically painted plaster casts of human and simian heads, with their skulls partly removed to reveal brain positioning and their faces still expressive of their death throes. Sharing the shelf space with these was a large collection of actual brains from a wide variety of creatures, housed in specimen jars full of formaldehyde. The remainder of the wall space was occupied by charts of human and animal nervous systems. In the center of the room were two steel operating tables, with channels for draining bodily fluids running down the center of their beds to the foot, where they emptied into steel receptacles on the floor. There were forms of roughly human dimensions on each of these tables, covered with sterile sheets. A pronounced aroma of animal decay and earth emanated from them.

Standing by the tables were two men, both wearing three-piece wool suits, the taller man’s a subdued but fashionably checked pattern, the shorter’s simple black. Their faces were almost totally obscured by the harsh glare of the electric operating lamps that were positioned above the tables and between us.

“Gentlemen,” Laszlo said, moving directly toward them. “I am Dr. Kreizler. I hope you haven’t been waiting long.”

“Not at all, Doctor,” said the taller man, shaking Kreizler’s hand. As he leaned into the bright light around the table I could see that his Semitic features were quite handsome—strong nose, steady brown eyes, and a good head of curling hair. The shorter man, by contrast, had small eyes, a fleshy face that was beaded with sweat, and thinning hair. They both looked to be in their early thirties. “I’m Sergeant Marcus Isaacson,” the taller man went on, “and this is my brother, Lucius.”

The shorter man looked annoyed as he extended a hand. “Detective Sergeant Lucius Isaacson, Doctor,” he said. Then, leaning back and speaking out of the side of his mouth, he murmured, “Don’t do that again. You said you wouldn’t.”

Marcus Isaacson rolled his eyes, then tried to smile at us as he, too, spoke out of the side of his mouth. “What? What did I do?”

“Don’t introduce me as your brother,” Lucius Isaacson whispered urgently.

“Gentlemen,” Kreizler said, a little perplexed by this spat. “Allow me to introduce a friend of mine, John Schuyler Moore.” I shook hands with them both as Kreizler continued: “Commissioner Roosevelt speaks quite highly of your talents, and thinks you may be able to give me some assistance with a bit of research I’m doing. You have two areas of speciality that particularly interest me—”

“Yes,” Marcus said, “criminal science and forensic medicine.”

Kreizler went on: “First of all, I’d like to know—”

“If you’re wondering about our names,” Marcus interrupted, “our mother and father were very concerned, when they arrived in America, that their children not be subjected to anti-Jewish feeling in school.”

“We were relatively lucky,” Lucius added. “Our sister’s name is Cordelia.”

“You see,” Marcus continued, “they were learning English by studying Shakespeare. When I was born they’d just started, with Julius Caesar. A year later, they were still on it, and my brother came. But by the time our sister arrived, two years after that, they were making progress, and had gotten to King Lear—”

“I’ve no doubt, gentlemen,” Kreizler finished for him, ever more concerned and treating them fully to the arched eyebrows and the predatory gaze. “Interesting though that may be, what I had intended to ask was how you arrived at your areas of specialization, and what led you to the police force.”

Lucius sighed, looking up. “Nobody wants to hear how we got our names, Marcus,” he mumbled. “I’ve told you that.”

Marcus’s face went a little red with anger and then he addressed Kreizler with deliberate seriousness, sensing the meeting wasn’t going well. “Well, you see, Doctor, it was our parents again, though I do understand that it may not be a particularly interesting explanation. My mother wanted me to be a lawyer, and my brother—the detective sergeant here—he was supposed to be a doctor. It didn’t work out. We’d started reading Wilkie Collins when we were boys, and had pretty well decided by the time we went to college that we wanted to be detectives.”

“Law and medical training were useful, at first,” Lucius continued, “but then we moved on and did some work for the Pinkertons. It wasn’t until Commissioner Roosevelt took over the department that we actually got a chance to join the police. I suppose you’ve heard that his hiring practices are a bit…unorthodox.”

I knew what he was referring to, and later explained it to Laszlo. Besides investigating nearly every officer and detective in the Police Department, and thus prompting many to resign, Roosevelt had made a point of hiring unlikely new recruits, in an effort to break the hold that the clique headed by Thomas Byrnes and such precinct heads as “Clubber” Williams and “Big Bill” Devery had on the force. Theodore was especially fond of bringing in Jews, whom he considered exceptionally honest and brave, referring to them as “Maccabean warriors for justice.” The Isaacson brothers were apparently representative of this effort, though “warriors” was not the first word that came to mind on meeting them.

“I take it,” Lucius ventured hopefully, wanting to get off the subject of their backgrounds, “that you want some help with this exhumation?” He indicated the two tables.

Kreizler studied him. “How did you know it’s an exhumation?”

“The smell, Doctor. It’s very distinct. And the positions of the bodies indicate a formal burial, not a random interment.”

Kreizler liked that, and brightened a bit. “Yes, Detective Sergeant, you have presumed correctly.” He moved over and whipped the sheets off the tables, at which point the stench was complemented by the rather disturbing sight of two small skeletons, one draped in a decaying black suit and the other in an equally decrepit white dress. Some bones were still connected, but many had come free of one another, and there were bits of hair and nails, along with spatterings of dirt, all over them. I tightened up and tried not to look away: this sort of thing was going to be my fate for a while, and I figured that I’d better get used to it. But the grisly grimaces of the two skulls spoke eloquently of the unnatural way in which the two children had died, and it was hard to continue examining them.

The Isaacson brothers’ faces displayed nothing but fascination as they approached the tables and listened to Laszlo: “Brother and sister, Benjamin and Sofia Zweig. Murdered. Their bodies found—”

“In a water tower,” Marcus said. “Three years ago. The case is still officially open.”

This, too, pleased Kreizler. “Over here,” he continued, indicating a small white table in the corner that was piled with clippings and documents, “you’ll find all the information concerning the case that I’ve been able to assemble. I should like the two of you to review it, and study the bodies. There is some urgency about the matter, so I can only offer you the afternoon and evening. I will be at Delmonico’s at eleven-thirty tonight. Meet me there, and in exchange for your information I shall be happy to offer you an excellent dinner.”

Marcus Isaacson’s enthusiasm broke for a moment of curiosity. “Dinner isn’t necessary, Doctor, if this is official business. Though we appreciate the offer.”

Laszlo nodded with a slight smile, amused at Marcus’s attempt to draw him out. “We’ll see you at eleven-thirty, then.”

At that the Isaacsons started in on the materials before them, barely conscious of Kreizler’s and my farewells. We went upstairs, and as I fetched my coat from the consultation room, Laszlo continued to look intrigued.

“There’s no doubting they’re idiosyncratic,” he said as he walked me to the front door. “But I’ve a feeling they know their work. We shall see. Oh, by the way, Moore—do you have a clean set of clothes for tonight?”

“Tonight?” I asked, pulling my cap and gloves on.

“The opera,” he replied. “Roosevelt’s candidate for liaison between our investigation and his office is due to meet us at my house at seven.”

“Who is he?”

“No idea,” Laszlo said with a shrug. “But whoever it is, the liaison’s role will be crucial. I thought we’d take him to the opera, and see how he reacts. It’s as good a test of character as any, and God knows when we’ll get another chance to go. We’ll use my box at the Metropolitan. Maurel is singing Rigoletto. It should suit our purpose.”

“It certainly should,” I said happily. “And speaking of purposes, who’s singing the hunchback’s daughter?”

Kreizler turned away with an expression of mild disgust. “My God, Moore, I should like to get the particulars of your infancy someday. This irrepressible sexual mania—”

“I only asked who’s singing the hunchback’s daughter!”

“All right, all right! Yes, Frances Saville, ‘She of the Legs,’ as you put it!”

“In that case,” I said, bouncing down the steps and toward the carriage, “I definitely have clothes.” As far as I was concerned, you could take Nellie Melba, Lillian Nordica, and all the rest of the half-attractive, four-star voices at the Metropolitan and, as Stevie Taggert would have put it, go chase yourself. Give me a really beautiful girl with a decent voice and I was a docile audience member. “I’ll be at your place at seven.”

“Splendid,” Kreizler answered with a frown. “I can scarcely wait. Cyrus! Take Mr. Moore to Washington Square!”

I spent the quick trip back up and across town pondering what an unusual—but nonetheless enjoyable—way to open a murder investigation the opera and dinner at Delmonico’s would be. Unfortunately, such entertainments did not turn out to be said opening; for when I arrived home, I found a very agitated Sara Howard on my doorstep.