The Alienist

CHAPTER 11

Knowing that I would need to be on my toes once I reached the hall, I decided to walk the mile or so to Cooper Square and let the cold air sober me up a bit. Broadway was nearly deserted, except for the occasional group of young men in white uniforms who were shoveling snow into large wagons. This was the private army of Colonel Waring, the street-cleaning genius who had tidied up Providence, Rhode Island, and then been imported to work the same magic in New York. Waring’s boys were unquestionably efficient—the amount of snow, horse manure, and general garbage on the streets had declined sharply since their advent—but their uniforms apparently made them think that they had some sort of enforcement status. Every so often a kid of about fourteen, dressed in one of Waring’s white tunics and helmets, would catch a less than stellar citizen throwing refuse carelessly onto the street and try to make an arrest. It was impossible to convince these zealots that they had no such authority, and the incidents continued. Sometimes they ended in violence, a record of which the boys were proud—and one which made me cautious as I passed them that night. My gait must have given away my condition, however, for as I walked by several teams of broom- and shovel-wielding vigilantes, they took my measure suspiciously, making it clear that if I wanted to soil the streets, I’d better do it in some other town.

By the time I reached Cooper Square I was feeling fairly alert and mighty cold. As I passed the big, brown mass of Cooper Union I began to think of the large glass of brandy I intended to order at Paresis Hall; I was thus caught thoroughly off guard when a workmen’s truck, bearing the legend GENOVESE & SONS—IRON WORKS—BKLYN., N.Y., came careening around the north end of Cooper Square Park behind a huffing gray horse that looked like he’d rather be anywhere than out on such a night. The truck ground to a halt, and four toughs in miner’s caps got out of the back, rushing into the park. They soon reappeared, dragging two expensively dressed men.

“Filthy fags!” one of the toughs shouted, catching the first man a nice blow across the face with what appeared to be a piece of pipe. Blood came instantly from the man’s nose and mouth, spattering across his clothes and onto the snow. “Get off the streets, if you want to bugger each other!”

Two of the other ambassadors from Brooklyn held the second man, who appeared older than the first, while a third put his face close. “Like to fuck boys, do you?”

“I’m sorry, but you’re really not my sort,” the man answered, with a composure that made me think this had happened to him before. “I like young men who bathe.” That one cost him three solid blows to the stomach, after which he doubled over and retched onto the frozen ground.

It was one of those moments for fast thinking: I could jump in and get my head cracked, or I could—

“Hey!” I shouted at the toughs, and they turned their cold-blooded stares on me. “You boys’d better watch it—there’s half a dozen cops on their way, saying no guineas from Brooklyn better start anything in the Fifteenth Precinct!”

“Oh, there are, eh?” said the tough who seemed to be the leader, as he moved back to the truck. “And which way’re they coming from?”

“Right down Broadway!” I said, jerking a thumb behind me.

“Come on, boys!” said the tough. “Let’s settle some mick hash!” That brought shouts and cheers from the other three as they piled into the truck and headed up Broadway, asking if I wanted to come along but not waiting for an answer.

I moved over to the two injured men, but could only say, “Do you need—” before they ran off in full flight, the older man clutching his ribs and moving with difficulty. I realized that when the toughs failed to find the cops, they’d probably return for me, and I therefore moved quickly across the Bowery under the tracks of the Third Avenue Elevated to Biff Ellison’s place.

Paresis Hall’s electric sign was still burning bright at close to three in the morning. The joint had taken its name from a patent medicine that advertised in dive toilets, promising protection and relief from the more serious social diseases. The windows of the Hall were shaded, and honest citizens of the neighborhood were grateful for that fact. Inside the busy doorway—around which stood a wide range of effeminate men and boys, all of them attempting to drum up business with entering and departing customers—was a long, brass-railed bar, along with a large number of round wooden tables and simple chairs of the sort that were easily broken in fights and easily replaced afterwards. A rough stage had been built at the far end of the long, high-ceilinged room, on which more boys and men in various stages of female dress cavorted to lively yet discordant music provided by a piano, clarinet, and violin.

The essential purpose of Paresis Hall was to arrange affairs between customers and the various types of prostitutes who worked there. This second group included everything from youths like Giorgio Santorelli to homosexuals who did not favor women’s clothes to the occasional bona fide female, who hung about in the hope that some one of the souls who wandered in would rediscover his heterosexuality to her profit. Most of the assignations worked out in the Hall took place at cheap hotels in the neighborhood, though the second floor had a dozen or so rooms out of which young boys who particularly pleased Ellison were allowed to conduct their business.

But what was more distinctive about the Hall, along with only a few other such places in town, was a near total lack of the secretiveness that usually marked homosexual dealings in the city. Released from the need to be in any way careful, Ellison’s patrons cavorted raucously and spent freely, and the Hall did enormous business. In the end, however, neither the scale nor the unusualness of its operations could keep it from being at heart like any other dive: sordid, smoky, and thoroughly disheartening.

I hadn’t been inside the door thirty seconds before there was a small but strong arm around my torso and a cold piece of metal at my throat. The sudden aroma of lilac alerted me to Ellison’s presence in the general area behind me; and I assumed that the metal I felt was the signature weapon of one of Biff’s cronies, Razor Riley. Riley was a skinny, dangerous little miscreant from Hell’s Kitchen who, though a Gopher, occasionally ran with and worked for Ellison, whose sexual preferences he shared.

“I thought Kelly and me made ourselves pretty clear the other day, Moore,” Ellison boomed. I still couldn’t see him. “You ain’t tying me to the Santorelli business. You gutsy or just crazy coming in here like this?”

“Neither, Biff,” I said, as clearly as extreme fear would allow: Riley was notoriously fond of cutting people up. “I just wanted you to know that I did you a good turn.”

Ellison laughed. “You, scribbler? What could you do for me?” At that he came around to face me, his ridiculous checked suit and gray bowler all reeking of cologne. He held a long, thin cigar in one beefy hand.

“I told the commissioner you didn’t have anything to do with it,” I gasped.

He came close, his thick lips parting to release the stench of bad whiskey. “Yeah?” he said, his little eyes gleaming. “And did you convince him?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Oh? How?”

“Simple. I told him it wasn’t your style.”

Ellison had to pause as the mass of cells that, in his case, passed for a brain mulled this over. Then he smiled. “Say—you’re right, Moore. It ain’t my style! Well, whattaya know—let ’im go, Razor.”

At that the several employees and customers who had gathered to see if there would be bloodshed dispersed in disappointment. I turned to the wiry figure of Razor Riley and watched as he folded his favorite weapon, pocketed it, and then smoothed his waxed mustache. He put his hands on his hips, ready to fight—but I just straightened my white tie and neatened my cuffs.

“Try milk, Riley,” I said. “I hear it helps the bones grow.”

Riley went for his pocket again, but Ellison laughed and restrained him with an effusive hug. “Aw, that’s all right, Razor, let the guy crack wise, it ain’t gonna hurt you.” Then he turned to me and put an arm around my neck. “Come on, Moore, I’ll buy you a drink. And you can tell me how come it is you turned into my pal all of a sudden.”

We stood at the bar, and I could see all the sad business of the Hall reflected in a large mirror that ran along the wall behind the endless bottles of bad liquor. Remembering exactly who and what I was dealing with, I abandoned the cherished idea of a brandy (besides being of shockingly poor quality, it was likely to be laced with any combination of camphor, benzine, cocaine shavings, and chloral hydrate) and ordered a beer. The swill I was given may even have been beer, too, at some point in its existence. As I took a sip, one of the chanteuses on the stage at the other end of the Hall began to whine:

There’s a name that’s never spoken,

And a mother’s heart half broken,

There is just another missing from the old home, that’s all…

Ellison took a glass of whiskey, then turned when a boy-whore patted his rump. Biff tweaked the youth’s cheek roughly.

“Well, Moore?” he said, staring into the boy’s painted eyes. “Why the good turn? Don’t tell me you’d like to sample the wares down here.”

“No, not tonight, Biff,” I said. “What I thought was that maybe since I helped you out with the cops, you might be willing to share some information—you know, give me a hand with the story, that kind of thing.”

He eyed me up and down as the boy-whore disappeared into the noisy throng. “Since when does the God-almighty New York Times run stories like that? And where the hell you been tonight, anyway, a funeral?”

“The opera,” I answered. “And the Times isn’t the only paper in town.”

“Yeah?” He didn’t sound convinced. “Well, I don’t know nothing about it, Moore. Gloria, she used to be okay. Really. Hell, I let her use one of the rooms upstairs, even. But she got—troublesome. Starts asking for a bigger cut, starts telling the other girls they ought to ask for one, too. So, a couple a nights ago, I says—Gloria, keep it up and you’re out on your pretty little ass. Then she plays like she’ll make nice, but I don’t trust her no more. I was gonna get rid of her—not in any permanent meaning of the word, right?—but just kick her out, let her work the streets a couple a weeks and see how she liked it. And then—this.” He gulped whiskey and blew cigar smoke. “The little guttersnipe had it coming, Moore.”

I waited a moment for him to go on; but his attention was distracted by two young men in stockings and garters who were shouting threats at each other out on the dance floor. Knives soon appeared. Ellison chuckled at the sight, and then offered his assessment:

“You two bitches cut each other up you won’t be no good to nobody!”

“Biff?” I said eventually. “So that’s all you can tell me?”

“That’s all,” he answered with a nod. “Now, how about you get outta here before there’s trouble?”

“Why? You hiding something? Upstairs, maybe?”

“No, I ain’t hiding anything,” he answered, annoyed. “I just don’t like reporters in my place. And my customers don’t like it, neither. Some of ’em are respectable boys, you know—got families and positions to consider.”

“Then maybe you’ll let me take a look at the room Gior—Gloria used. Just to convince me you’re square.”

Ellison sighed, leaning back on the bar. “Don’t push it, Moore.”

“Five minutes,” I answered.

He considered it and nodded. “Five minutes. But don’t talk to nobody. Third door on your left, when you get up the stairs.” I started to move away. “Hey.” As I turned back, he handed me my beer. “Don’t abuse my hospitality, pal.”

I nodded and took the beer, then pushed through the crowd to a staircase at the back of the Hall. Several boys and men approached me, seeing the evening suit and smelling money. They propositioned me with every conceivable line, some running their hands along my chest and thighs. But I put a good grip on my billfold and stayed on course to the staircase, trying to keep the physically repellant suggestions with which I was peppered from registering in my mind. As I passed the stage, the droning singer—a fat, middle-aged man wearing heavy facial powder, lip rouge, and a top hat—repeated the refrain:

Yes, there is still a mem’ry living,

There’s a father unforgiving,

And a picture that is turn-ed to the wall!

The inside of the staircase was unlit, but the glow of the Hall crept in enough to let me see where I was going. The old, colorless paint on the walls was peeling badly, and as I mounted the first step I heard a grunting sound coming from behind me. Looking into a dark recess on the other side of the doorway, I saw the faint outlines of a youth, his face shoved up against the wall, and another, an older man, who was pressing against the youth’s naked backside. With a shudder that made me trip I turned away and hurried up the stairs, pausing once I was in the bare second-floor hall to take a big belt of beer.

Calming a bit, but beginning to wonder about the wisdom of my initiative, I found the third door on the left: a thin, simple wooden job, just like all the others in the hallway. I grabbed the knob, but then thought to knock. I was surprised when a boy’s voice said:

“Who is it?”

I opened the door slowly. There was nothing in the room but an old bed and a night table next to it. The paint on the walls was a red that had turned brown, and it was peeling in the corners. There was a small window that looked out on the blank brick wall of the building next door, across about ten feet of alley space.

On the bed sat a flaxen-haired kid, maybe fifteen, his face painted much as Giorgio Santorelli’s had been. He wore a sheer linen shirt with lace cuffs and collar, and some theatrical tights. The makeup around his eyes was smudged—he’d been crying.

“I’m not working right now,” he said, straining to reach a falsetto pitch. “Maybe you could come back in an hour or so.”

“That’s all right,” I said, “I’m not—”

“I said I’m not working!” the young man shouted, losing the falsetto altogether. “Oh, God, get out, can’t you see I’m upset?”

He broke down in tears, clutching at his face, and I stood by the door, suddenly noticing that it felt very warm in the room. I watched the boy for a few minutes, and then something occurred to me:

“You knew Gloria,” I said.

The boy sniffed and wiped carefully at his eyes. “Yes. I knew her. Oh, my face—please go away.”

“No, you don’t understand. I’m trying to find out who killed him—her.”

The boy looked up at me plaintively. “Are you a cop?”

“No, a reporter.”

“A reporter?” He looked back at the floor, wiped his eyes again, and chuckled humorlessly. “Well, I’ve got a hell of a story for you.” He stared out of the window forlornly. “Whoever it was that they found down on that bridge—it couldn’t have been Gloria.”

“Wasn’t Gloria?” The rising temperature in the room was making me thirsty, and I took another big swig of beer. “What makes you think so?”

“Because Gloria never left this room.”

“Never—” It occurred to me that I’d been up too long and had too much to drink: I was having trouble following the kid. “What do you mean?”

“I’ll tell you what I mean. That night, I was in the hallway, outside my room, with a customer. I saw Gloria come in here, alone. I was out there for a good hour, and her door never opened. I figured she was asleep. My customer left after buying me a couple of drinks—the guy didn’t want to pay the price for Sally. That’s me. Sally’s expensive, and he didn’t have what it takes. So I stood there another half an hour, waiting for somebody else to wander up. I didn’t feel like working the floor. And then one of the girls comes screaming in, saying that a cop just told her they found Gloria dead downtown. I ran right in here, and sure enough, she was gone. But she never left.”

“Well…” I tried hard to figure it. “The window, then.” As I crossed to it, I stumbled a bit; I really did need some sleep. The window groaned as I opened it, and when I put my head out, the air wasn’t as cold as it should have been.

“The window?” I heard Sally say. “How? Did she fly? It’s a straight drop down, and Gloria didn’t have a ladder, or rope, or anything. Besides, I asked one of the girls working the front of the alley if she saw Gloria come out that way. She said no.”

The drop from the window to the alley was indeed a precipitous one; it seemed an unlikely escape route. As for the roof, it was another two stories up, along a brick wall that offered no apparent purchases, and was without a fire escape of any kind. I came back inside and closed the window. “Then—” I said. “Then…”

Suddenly I collapsed onto the bed. Sally let out one little shriek at that, and then another when she looked toward the door. Following her glance with difficulty, I saw Ellison, Razor Riley, and a couple of their favorites in the doorway. Riley had his trademark out, and was wiping it back and forth across the palm of one hand. Despite the condition of my mind, I knew instantly that they’d slipped chloral into my beer. A lot of chloral.

“I told you not to talk to anybody, Moore,” Ellison said. And then to the youths: “Well, girls—he’s a pretty one to look at, ain’t he? Who wants to have some fun with the reporter?”

Two of the young painted men leapt onto the bed and began to tug at my clothes. I was able to get halfway up and onto my elbows before Riley raced over and laid a shot on my jaw. Going back down, I recall hearing the singer downstairs launch into “You Made Me What I Am Today—I Hope You’re Satisfied”; then the two youths were fighting over my billfold and tearing at my pants as Riley began to bind my hands.

Unconsciousness was coming fast—but just before it arrived, I thought I caught a glimpse of Stevie Taggert jumping into the room like a wild wolf cub, brandishing a long piece of wood studded with rusty nails…