The Alienist

CHAPTER 15

Sara came and stood by me. “John—who are they?”

“Offhand,” I answered, feeling a different and a more vital sense of concern than I had at any point during that night, “I’d say that the morning edition of the Post has reached the streets.”

“What do you suppose they want?” Lucius asked, his head sweating more than ever despite the cold.

“They want an explanation, I expect,” Kreizler answered. “But how did they know to come here?”

“There was a cop from the Twenty-seventh Precinct,” Cyrus said, still very anxious, for it had been a mob much like the one we now faced that had tortured and killed his parents. “He was down there with two other men, explaining something to them. Then those two fellas went into the crowd and started talking it up pretty good, about how it’s only poor foreign kids that’re getting killed. Seems most of those people out there come from over on the East Side.”

“The officer was, no doubt, Roundsman Barclay,” Theodore said, his face full of that particular anger that was inspired by treacherous subordinates. “He’s the man who was here earlier.”

“There goes Miller!” Marcus said suddenly, at which I looked down to see the watchman fleeing without his hat toward the Bedloe’s Island ferry station. “Fortunately I kept his keys,” Marcus added. “He didn’t look like a man who’d be around long.”

Just then the noise of the largest group of people, who were straight ahead of us and quite visible through the branches of the park’s still-bare trees, began to grow louder, reaching a crescendo with a couple of venomous yells. We heard a clatter of horses’ hooves and carriage wheels, and then Kreizler’s calash appeared, barreling down the main path of the park toward the castle. Stevie held his horsewhip high and drove Frederick hard, around the front walls of the fort to the pair of large doors in the rear.

“Good man, Stevie,” I murmured, turning to the others. “That’ll be our best way out—through the back doors and up the river side of the park!”

“I suggest we get to it,” Marcus said. “They’re moving.”

With another series of shouts, the crowd at the main entrance came into the park, at which the groups to their right and left also began to surge forward. It now became clear that there were still more people streaming into the area from surrounding streets—the mob would soon number in the many hundreds. Someone had done an expert job of inflammation.

“The devil!” Theodore grunted ferociously. “Where is the night watch from the Twenty-seventh? I’ll have them over hot coals!”

“An ideal plan for the morning,” Kreizler said, making for the staircase. “At the moment, however, escape seems imperative.”

“But this is a crime scene!” Theodore continued indignantly. “I will not have it disturbed by any mob, whatever their complaint!” He glanced about the roof, then picked up a stout section of cut wood. “Doctor, none of you can be found here—take Miss Howard and go. The detective sergeants and I will face these people at the front gate.”

“We will?” It had gotten out of Lucius’s mouth before he quite knew what he was saying.

“Steel yourself,” Roosevelt answered with a grin, grabbing Lucius’s shoulder heartily and then taking a few good cuts at the night air with his piece of wood. “After all, this fort defended us from the British Empire—it can certainly withstand a mob from the Lower East Side!” It was one of those moments when you wanted to slap the man, even if there was sense in his blustering.

In order to conceal completely the nature of our work, it was necessary for the rest of us to take the Isaacsons’ equipment away in the calash. Having made our way back down and through the tanks of fish, we stowed the various boxes on board the carriage, and then I turned to wish the Isaacsons good luck. Marcus seemed to be searching the ground for something, while Lucius was checking a police-issue revolver uncomfortably.

“You may not be able to avoid a fight,” I said to them, with a smile that I hoped was reassuring, “but don’t let Roosevelt force you into one.”

Lucius only groaned a bit, but Marcus smiled bravely and shook my hand. “We’ll meet you at Number 808,” he said.

With that they closed the fort’s rear doors and replaced the chains and locks. I jumped up and grasped the side of the calash—Kreizler and Sara were already in the two seats, and Cyrus was up top with Stevie—and we started with a jolt down a path that took us to the harbor’s edge and then northward along the river. The noise of the crowd outside Castle Garden had continued to grow, but as we passed within sight of the fort’s front gates the angry shouts suddenly subsided. I strained my head around to see Theodore outside the structure’s heavy black portal, calmly holding his club with one hand and pointing toward the edge of the park with the other. The action-crazed fool simply couldn’t stay safely inside. The Isaacsons were in the doorway behind him, ready to rebolt the doors at a moment’s notice. But that didn’t look to be necessary—the crowd actually seemed to be listening to Theodore.

As we approached the northern edge of the park, Stevie picked up speed, and nearly ran us headlong into a phalanx of about twenty cops as they trotted toward Castle Garden. We took a hard left at Battery Place in order to keep to the deserted waterfront, and as we did I got a brief but clear glimpse of an expensive brougham that was parked at a corner which enjoyed a full view of the events at the fort. A hand—well manicured, with a tasteful silver ring on the little finger—appeared at the brougham’s door, followed by the upper part of a man’s body. Even in the dim light of the arc lamps I could see the gleam of an elegant tie stud, and soon a set of handsome Black Irish features: Paul Kelly. I yelled to Kreizler and told him to look, but we were moving too fast for him to catch a glimpse. When I related what I’d seen, however, his face showed that he’d drawn the obvious conclusion.

The crowd, then, had been Kelly’s work, probably in response to Steffens’s remarks about Biff Ellison in the Post. It all fit—Kelly was not known for making idle threats, and whipping up a fury over the murders among a deeply and perpetually disgruntled segment of the populace would have been child’s play for so devious a man. Nevertheless, the move had almost cost our team dearly, indeed I feared it might still do so; and as I continued to cling to the side of the speeding calash, I vowed that, should anything happen to Theodore and the Isaacsons, I would hold the chief of the Five Pointers personally responsible.

Stevie didn’t ease up on Frederick at any point during our ride home, and no one asked him to—each of us, for his or her own reasons, wanted to put some distance on Castle Garden. There were pools of rainwater in many of the roughly paved streets on the West Side, and by the time we reached Number 808 Broadway I was splattered with mud, cold as the tomb, and ready to call it a night (or a morning, since dawn was not far off ). But the job of dragging the equipment upstairs and recording our thoughts on the murder while they were still fresh remained, and we set about it dutifully. When the elevator reached the sixth floor, Kreizler discovered that he had misplaced his key, and I gave him mine, which was caked with mud. Overall, it was a bedraggled, exhausted little group that filed into headquarters at 5:15 A.M. that Saturday.

My surprise and joy were all the greater, therefore, when the first thing that greeted my senses was the smell of steak and eggs frying and strong coffee brewing. A light was on in the small kitchen at the rear of our floor, and I could see Mary Palmer—dressed not in her blue linen uniform but in a pretty white blouse, a plaid skirt, and an apron—moving about in quick, capable motions. I dropped the cases I was lugging.

“God has sent me an angel,” I said, stumbling toward the kitchen. Mary started a bit when she saw my muddy frame coming out of the shadows, but her blue eyes soon settled down and she showed me a little smile, offering a bit of hot, sizzling steak on the end of a long fork and then a cup of coffee. I started to say, “Mary, how did you…,” but quickly abandoned the attempt and concentrated on the delicious food and drink. She had quite a production going: a legion of eggs and what looked like sides of lean beef in deep iron skillets that she must have brought from Kreizler’s house. I could have stayed in there for quite a while, bathing in the warmth and the aromas; but as I turned back around, I found Laszlo standing behind me, his arms folded and a sour scowl on his face.

“Well,” he said. “I suppose I know now what happened to my key.”

I assumed his admonishment was in jest. “Laszlo,” I said through a mouthful of steak, “I believe I may actually revive—”

“Will you excuse Mary and me for a moment, Moore?” Kreizler said, in the same hard tone; and from the look on the girl’s face, I could see that she knew he was quite serious, even if I didn’t. Instead of questioning him, however, I scooped some eggs and a bit more steak onto a plate, grabbed my mug of coffee, and headed for my desk.

As soon as I was out of the kitchen I heard Kreizler start to lecture Mary in no uncertain terms. The poor girl was unable to offer any reply other than an occasional no and a small, quiet sob. It didn’t make sense to me; for my money she’d done yeoman service, and Kreizler was being inexplicably mean. My thoughts were soon distracted, however, by Cyrus and Stevie, who hovered over my plate in drop-jawed hunger.

“Now, now, boys,” I said, covering my food with my arms. “No need to get physical. There’s plenty more in the kitchen.”

They both bolted energetically toward the back, straightening up only slightly when they encountered Kreizler. “Get something to eat,” Laszlo told them brusquely, “and then take Mary back to Seventeenth Street. Quickly.”

Stevie and Cyrus each mumbled assent, and then descended on the unsuspecting steak and eggs. Kreizler pulled one of the Marchese Carcano’s green chairs between Sara’s and my desks and fell into it wearily.

“You don’t want anything to eat, Sara?” Laszlo asked quietly.

She had her head on her arms on top of her desk, but picked it up just long enough to smile and say, “No. Thank you, Doctor, I couldn’t. And I don’t think Mary would appreciate my presence in the kitchen.” Kreizler nodded.

“A little hard on the girl, weren’t you, Kreizler?” I said, as sternly as I could manage through more mouthfuls of food.

He sighed once and closed his eyes. “I’ll have to ask you not to interfere, John. It may seem severe—but I don’t want Mary to know anything about this case.” He opened his eyes and looked toward the kitchen. “For a variety of reasons.”

There are moments in life when one feels as though one’s walked into the wrong theater during the middle of a performance. I was suddenly aware of some very odd chemistry at work among Laszlo, Mary, and Sara. I couldn’t have put a label on it, not if I’d been paid; but as I pulled a bottle of good French cognac from the bottom drawer of my desk and added some of it to my still-steaming coffee, I became increasingly aware that the air in the large room had suddenly become charged. This instinctive feeling was confirmed when Mary, Stevie, and Cyrus came out of the kitchen and Kreizler asked for his key back. Mary returned it reluctantly, and then I caught her shooting Sara a quick, angry scowl as she went out the door with the other two. No doubt about it—there was a subtext to all this activity.

But there were more important issues at hand, and with Mary, Stevie, and Cyrus gone, the rest of us were free to begin trading thoughts on them. Kreizler went to the chalkboard, which he had divided into three general areas: CHILDHOOD on the left-hand side, INTERVAL in the center, and ASPECTS OF THE CRIMES to the right. In their proper areas Laszlo began to jot down the theories that we had come up with on the roof of Castle Garden, leaving a small space for any salient insights that the Isaacsons might have had since we left them. Kreizler then stood back to review the list of details; and though it offered, to my way of thinking, evidence of a good night’s work, Laszlo seemed to find it wanting. He tossed his bit of chalk up and down, shifting from one foot to the other, and finally announced that there was one more significant factor we must make note of: in the top right-hand corner of the board, under the heading ASPECTS OF THE CRIMES, he chalked the word WATER.

That baffled me; but Sara, after giving it some thought, pointed out that every one of the murders since January had taken place within sight of a large amount of water—and the Zweigs had actually been deposited in a water tower. When I asked if that wasn’t just a coincidence, Kreizler said that he doubted so careful a schemer as our killer left very much to coincidence. Laszlo then walked to his desk and pulled an old leather-bound volume from one stack of books. As he switched on a small desk lamp I braced myself, expecting some lengthy technical quote from the likes of Professor Mosso of Turin (who, I’d recently learned, was doing groundbreaking research in measuring the physical manifestations of emotional states). But what Laszlo read, in a quiet, tired voice, was something quite different:

“‘Who can understand his errors? Cleanse thou me from secret faults.’”

Kreizler switched off the desk lamp and sat back down. I took a blind stab and guessed that the quote was from the Bible, to which Laszlo nodded, remarking that he never ceased to be amazed at the number of references to cleansing that could be found in religious works. He was quick to add that he did not necessarily believe that our man suffered from a religious mania or dementia (although such afflictions had characterized more mass murderers than almost any other form of mental distress); rather, he was citing the quote to indicate, somewhat poetically, the extent to which the killer was oppressed by feelings of sin and guilt, for which water was the usual metaphorical antidote.

That remark stuck in Sara’s craw. In a troubled, somewhat impatient voice she noted that Kreizler persistently returned to the notion that our killer was aware of the nature of his actions, and desired apprehension—yet at the same time the man continued to go out and slaughter young boys. If we accepted the supposition of his sanity, then we were left with the nagging question of what possible satisfaction or benefit he could be deriving from the butchery. Before replying to this pointed observation, Laszlo paused, considering his words carefully. He knew, as did I, that it had been a long and bewildering night for Sara. I also knew that after viewing one of those bodies the last thing one wanted to hear was a descriptive analysis of the mental context of the man responsible; the sadness, anger, and horror were all too great. But the fact remained that such an analysis was imperative, especially at that vivid moment. Sara must be coaxed back to the task immediately before us, a goal that Laszlo approached obliquely by asking her some gentle, seemingly unconnected questions:

Imagine, he said, that you enter a large, somewhat crumbling hall that echoes with the sounds of people mumbling and talking repetitively to themselves. All around you these people fall into prostrate positions, some of them weeping. Where are you? Sara’s answer was immediate: in an asylum. Perhaps, Kreizler answered, but you could also be in a church. In the one place the behavior would be considered mad; in the other, not only sane, but as respectable as any human activity can be. Kreizler went on to try some other examples: If a woman and her children were threatened with every kind of violence by a group of attackers, and the only weapon at the mother’s disposal was something along the lines of a meat cleaver, would Sara consider the woman’s necessarily gruesome efforts to dispatch the men the work of a mad savage? Or if another mother were to learn that her husband was beating and having sexual relations with their children, and she cut his throat in the middle of the night, would that qualify as unacceptable brutality? Sara said that, while she would answer no to those questions, she also considered such cases very different from the one we were presently dealing with. That brought a quick rejoinder from Laszlo: The only difference, he declared, was among Sara’s perceptions of the various examples. An adult protecting a child, or a child protecting itself, was apparently a context in which Sara could justify even fearsome violence; but what if our murderer viewed his current work as just that sort of protection? Could Sara shift her point of view enough to grasp that every victim and situation leading up to a murder resonated within the killer to a distant experience of threat and violence and led him for reasons that we had not yet fully defined to take angry measures in his own defense?

Sara remained more reluctant than unable to follow all this; I, on the other hand, was surprised to find my own thoughts falling right into line with Kreizler’s. Perhaps the brandy was pushing my mind past its usual limits; whatever the case, I piped up to say that each dead body seemed, in the light Laszlo was casting, to be a kind of mirror. Kreizler lifted a satisfied fist and said, Precisely—the bodies were a mirror image of some savage set of experiences that were central to the evolution of our man’s mind. Whether we took the biological approach, and concentrated on the formation of what Professor James called “neural pathways,” or the philosophical route, which would lead into a discussion of the development of the soul, we would arrive at the same conclusion: the idea of a man for whom violence was not only deeply ingrained behavior but the starting point of his meaningful experiences. What he saw when he looked at those dead children was only a representation of what he felt had been done to him—even if only physically—at some point deep in his past. Certainly, when we looked at the bodies our first thoughts were of vengeance for the dead and protection of future victims. Yet the profound irony was that our killer believed he was providing himself with just those things: vengeance for the child he had been, protection for the tortured soul he had become.

Despite the care Kreizler took in explaining all this to Sara, the effort brought no change in her attitude. It was simply too soon to expect her to put the experience of Castle Garden away and get back to business. She shifted and writhed in her chair, shaking her head and protesting that everything Kreizler said sounded like a somewhat absurd rationalization: Laszlo was comparing the emotional and physical trials of childhood with the worst kind of adult blood lust, she stated defiantly, whereas no such correlation existed—the two phenomena were out of all proportion to each other. Kreizler answered that such might seem to be the case, but only because Sara was deciding the proportions herself, based on the context of her experience. Anger and destructiveness were not the guiding instincts of her life—but what if they had been, since long before she’d become capable of conscious thought? What mere physical action could satisfy such deep-seated rage? In the case of our man, not even the brutal killings could achieve it; had they been able to, he would still have been quietly going about his business, hiding the bodies and never courting discovery.

Seeing that all these sound points were continuing to have little effect on our intransigent partner, I took the opportunity to suggest that we all try to get some sleep. The sun had begun to creep up over the city during our talk, bringing with it that state of extreme disorientation that accompanies most all-night vigils. I’m sure that Kreizler also knew that rest would put many things right; all the same, he made one last request, as Sara left with me, that she not allow horror and anger to lead her too far from the course of our undertaking. Her role had, that night, been revealed as even more important than he’d originally thought it: Our murderer had spent his childhood among men and women, and whatever else the rest of us could suppose about the women involved in those experiences, our theories would never amount to more than a badly flawed set of assumptions. It would be up to Sara to provide us with a different perspective, to create for us a woman (or series of women) who might have helped foster such rage. We could not succeed without that.

Sara nodded wearily at the thought of this new responsibility, and I knew I’d better get her away from Kreizler, who was exhausting enough even on a full night’s sleep. I opened the front door and guided her out into the elevator, and as we descended to the ground the only audible sound was the quiet, strangely comforting hum of the device’s engine echoing in the dark shaftway.

On the first floor we ran into the Isaacsons, whose return had been delayed not by the mob at Castle Garden (which had dissipated fairly soon after our departure) but by Theodore, who had insisted that they accompany him to one of his favorite Bowery haunts for a victory breakfast of steak and beer. The two detective sergeants looked just as exhausted as Sara and I, and since they had to go up and report before they’d be allowed any sleep, we didn’t talk much. Marcus and I made a quick plan to meet the following afternoon and venture over to the Golden Rule Pleasure Club, and then it was into the elevator for them and out to find a cab on largely deserted Broadway for Sara and myself.

There weren’t many hacks braving the early morning cold, though what few there were had mercifully congregated outside the St. Denis Hotel across the street. I helped Sara into a hansom, but before giving the driver her destination she looked up at the still-lit windows of the sixth floor of Number 808.

“He never seems to stop,” she said quietly. “It’s almost as if—as if he has a personal stake in it.”

“Well,” I answered, yawning broadly, “a lot of his professional ideas could be validated by the result.”

“No,” Sara said, still quietly. “Something else—something more…”

Following her gaze up to our headquarters, I decided to express a concern of my own: “I wish I knew what was going on with Mary.”

Sara smiled. “You never were the most romantically perceptive man, John.”

“Meaning?” I asked, genuinely baffled.

“Meaning,” Sara answered, somewhat indulgently, “that she’s in love with him.” As I stood there agape, she tapped on the roof of the hansom. “Gramercy Park, driver. Goodbye, John.”

Sara was still smiling as the cab pulled around and headed up Broadway. A couple of the other hacks asked me if I also needed a rig, but after that last bit of intelligence I could only shake my head blankly. Maybe the walk—or, as it was, stumble—home would help me make some sense of it, I thought; but I couldn’t have been more wrong. The implications of Sara’s statement, and the look on her face as she delivered it, were all too bizarre to be made sense of in a few weary minutes. All the walk did was exhaust me further, and by the time I hit the sheets in my grandmother’s house I was far too weak in body and disturbed in spirit to even remove my muddy clothes.