The Alienist

CHAPTER 17

The notion of our killer’s being an experienced mountain and rock climber had first occurred to Marcus, he explained, when I brought the boy Sally’s story back from Paresis Hall. But when he’d tried to find evidence of such activity at the Williamsburg Bridge anchor, and then at the Hall, he’d come up with almost nothing, and thought of abandoning the idea. His mind kept being brought back to the idea, however, by the speed with which the man had negotiated some pretty tricky spots, as well as by the absence of any ladders or other, more conventional climbing apparatus. There could be no other explanation, to Marcus’s way of thinking: the murderer had to be using advanced mountaineering techniques to get in and out of the windows of his intended victims’ rooms. That the man was especially expert was indicated by the fact that he must have been carrying the boys when he left the buildings, since they almost certainly knew nothing about climbing. All of this was consistent with the idea, already stated by the Isaacsons at Delmonico’s, that the killer was a big, powerful man. Faced with all these considerations, Marcus had done some more detailed research into climbing techniques, and returned to the bridge anchor and Paresis Hall.

This time, his better-trained eye had indeed found marks on the exterior walls of Ellison’s joint that could have been left by a climber’s nail-studded boots, as well as by pitons, large steel spikes that climbers drive into rock with hammers for direct hand and foot support, and also as anchors for ropes. The marks were hardly conclusive, so he hadn’t mentioned them at any of our meetings. But at Castle Garden Marcus had discovered distinctive rope fibers along the rear edge of the rooftop: a further suggestion that the killer was a climber. The fibers seemed to lead to the front railing of the roof, which turned out to be very solidly anchored. That had been the point at which Marcus had told us to lower him down the rear wall of the fort, where he found more marks that matched those he’d discovered at the Hall. At that point, Marcus had begun to work out a probable sequence of events for the Castle Garden killing:

The murderer, with his latest victim on his back, had climbed to the roof of the fort using pitons. (The watchman hadn’t noticed the sound of the hammering because, Marcus had learned, he actually spent most of his time sleeping, a fact of which Marcus was sure the killer was aware.) Once on the roof, our man had committed the murder, then wrapped a rope around the front railing and rappelled back to the ground. This last was a European term for the technique of descending a sheer mountainside by way of a rope that had been looped around a secure anchor point above. Both strands of the rope were then dropped, so that the whole could be pulled down by the climber when he reached the bottom. As our killer lowered himself along the wall, he’d been able to remove the pitons he’d used for support earlier.

Satisfied with his reasoning, Marcus had first attempted to find specific evidence to support it at Paresis Hall, since the Santorelli murder was long past and there weren’t likely to be any policemen around. But then he’d realized that at the Hall the killer would have been descending from the roof, not coming up from the ground, and probably wouldn’t have used pitons at all (the marks Marcus had originally thought to be left by pitons at that site were therefore made by something else, probably something altogether unconnected to our case). So Marcus had returned to Castle Garden just before meeting me, and continued a search of the grounds that he’d barely begun the night before—I’d been right when I thought he was looking for something just before our hasty departure from that place. The few cops who were positioned at Castle Garden that afternoon were nowhere near the rear entrance of the fort, and so Marcus had been free to scour that area.

At this point in his tale, my companion reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a rather innocuous steel spike that he’d discovered lying in some grass. The thing had an eye at one end: for securing ropes, Marcus told me. He’d dusted the piton for prints once he’d gotten it home, and found a set that exactly matched those we’d taken from the ceramic chimney the night before. I had to give the man a firm, admiring slap on the back, at that: Marcus was as dogged as any detective I’d met during the years I’d been covering the police beat, and considerably more intelligent. It was small wonder he hadn’t gotten along with the old guard at the Division of Detectives.

For the remainder of our walk Marcus went on to explain the larger implications of his discovery. Though mountaineering hadn’t really caught on as a form of recreation in North America as of 1896, in Europe the sport was well established. Throughout the last century, expert teams on that continent had knocked off peaks in the Alps and the Caucasus, and one intrepid German had even ventured to East Africa and conquered Mount Kilimanjaro. Nearly all these groups, Marcus told me, had been either English, Swiss, or German; and in those countries mountain and rock climbing of a less ambitious nature had become a very popular form of recreation. Given that our killer displayed what could only be called expertise, it was likely that he’d been exposed to the sport quite a long time ago, perhaps even in his youth; and it was therefore very possible that his family had immigrated to America from one of those three European nations in the not-too-distant past. That might not mean much just at the moment; but it was easy to see that, when added to other crucial factors further down the road, it could become highly illuminating. In such knowledge there was real cause for hope.

We would need an abundant reservoir of that particular emotion during our visit to the Golden Rule Pleasure Club, a pestilential little hole that could not have had a more sadly ironic name. Paresis Hall at least had the advantages of being aboveground and fairly roomy; the Golden Rule was housed in a dank, cramped basement that had been divided into small “rooms” by shoddy partitions, where any one client’s activities were made known to everyone in the place by sound if not by sight. Run by a large, repulsive woman called Scotch Ann, the Golden Rule offered only effeminate young boys who painted themselves, spoke in falsetto voices, and called each other by women’s names, leaving the other variations on male homosexual behavior to joints like Ellison’s. In 1892 the Golden Rule had gained notoriety when the Reverend Charles Parkhurst, a Presbyterian pastor and head of the Society for the Prevention of Crime, had visited the place during his campaign to bare the links between New York’s criminal underworld and various agencies of the city government, particularly the Police Department. Parkhurst, a strong, noble-looking fellow who was far more tolerable than most antivice crusaders, had enlisted a private detective, Charlie Gardner, as a guide for the odyssey. Charlie was an old friend of mine, and he’d immediately invited me to come along on what promised to be a thoroughly entertaining spree.

By 1892, however, the fires of my youth had begun to cool, and I’d started to make a strong run at mending my reprobate ways. Wondering if perhaps there wasn’t something to the idea of a stable, peaceful existence, both professional and domestic, I’d fixed my eyes on Washington politics and Julia Pratt, and was not prepared to jeopardize either my journalistic or my romantic standing by throwing in with Charlie Gardner for even one night. Thus my only contribution to Reverend Parkhurst’s soon-to-be-famous adventure was a short list of dives and hells that I thought the group should visit. Visit them they did, along with many other centers of infamy; and subsequent written accounts of Parkhurst’s exposure to the realm of vice generally—and to the Golden Rule in particular—made polite society’s hair stand on end.

It was Parkhurst’s revelations about how very degenerate life in much of New York had become, and how very much many members of the city government profited from that degeneracy, that led to a New York State Senate committee’s investigation of official corruption in the city. Headed by Clarence Lexow, the committee ended up calling for “an indictment against the Police Department of New York City as a whole,” and many members of the old police guard felt the sting of reform. As I’ve said before, however, degeneracy and corruption are not passing aspects but permanent features of life in New York; and while it has always been pleasant to think, when listening to such righteously outraged speakers as Parkhurst, Lexow, Mayor Strong, and even Theodore, that one is hearing the voice of the solid base of the city’s population, walking into a place like the Golden Rule never fails to bring one hard up against the fact that the drives and desires that spawn such joints—drives that would bring ostracism and even prosecution in any other part of the United States—have at least as many disciples and defenders as does “decent society.”

Of course, the defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people, as became clear to Marcus when we entered the nondescript front door of the Golden Rule on that Saturday evening. Almost immediately, we came face-to-face with a round-bellied, middle-aged man in expensive evening clothes, who shielded his face as he exited the place and then hurried into a very expensive carriage that was waiting for him at the curb. Behind him came a boy of fifteen or sixteen, typically dolled up for a night’s work and counting money with great satisfaction. The boy called something after the man in the usual grating falsetto register that was, for the uninitiated, so strange and disturbing; and then he walked by us very playfully, promising a full evening’s entertainment should we choose him from among his mates. Marcus turned immediately away and stared at the ceiling, but I answered the boy, telling him we were not customers and that we wanted to see Scotch Ann.

“Oh,” the boy droned languorously in his natural voice. “More cops, I guess. Ann!” He moved toward a large room farther inside the basement, from which emanated raucous laughter. “There’s more gentle-men about the murder!”

We followed the boy for a few steps, stopping at the entrance to the large room. Inside it were a few pieces of once ostentatious but now-decrepit furniture, and over the cold, moldy floor was thrown a well-worn Persian carpet. On the carpet was a squatting, half-naked man in his thirties, who crawled about and laughed as several even more scantily dressed boys vaulted over him.

“Leapfrog,” Marcus mumbled, taking it in with a nervous glance. “Didn’t they lure Parkhurst into something like that when he came here?”

“That was at Hattie Adams’s, up in the Tenderloin,” I answered. “Parkhurst didn’t last long in the Golden Rule—when he found out what actually went on here he bolted.”

Sauntering out from the area of the back rooms came Scotch Ann, heavily painted, obviously drunk, and well past her prime, if indeed she had ever had one. A flimsy pink dress clung to her powdered body (rising so high on her chest that one could not say if she was, in fact, a woman at all), and her face bore the harassed, weary scowl common to disorderly house owners when presented with an unexpected visit from the law.

“I don’t know what you want, boys,” she said, in a gruff voice that’d been destroyed by alcohol and smoking, “but I already pay two precinct captains five hundred bucks a month each to let me stay open. Which means there’s nothing left over for fly cops. And everything I know about the murder I already told one detective—”

“That’s lucky,” Marcus said, showing his badge and taking Ann by the arm toward the front door. “Then it’s all fresh in your mind. But don’t worry, information is all we want.”

Somewhat relieved that her recitation would cost her nothing, Scotch Ann gave forth with the story of Fatima, originally Ali ibn-Ghazi, a fourteen-year-old Syrian boy who had been in America just over a year. Ali’s mother had died within weeks of the family’s arrival in New York, after picking up a lethal disease down in the Syrian ghetto near Washington Market. The boy’s father, an unskilled laborer, had subsequently been unable to find any work at all, and took to begging. He put his children on display in order to spur the generosity of passersby, and it was while Ali was serving in this capacity, on a corner near the Golden Rule, that Scotch Ann first caught sight of him. The boy’s delicate Near Eastern features made him, as Ann put it, “a natural for my place.” She quickly “came to terms” with the father, terms that closely resembled indenture or perhaps even slavery. Thus was born “Fatima,” at the mention of which absurd appellation I discovered that I was rapidly losing patience with the practice of renaming young boys so that they could be proferred to adult men who either had inane scruples about who they molested or were aroused by particularly ridiculous perversions. “She was a real moneymaker,” Scotch Ann told us. I felt like belting the woman, but Marcus pursued the investigation calmly and professionally. Ann could provide us with few other particulars about Ali, and became concerned when we said we wanted to both see the room out of which he’d worked and interview any boys who were particularly friendly with him.

“I suppose there weren’t many,” Marcus said casually. “He was probably a difficult young man.”

“Fatima?” Ann said, pulling her head back. “If she was, I never knew about it. Oh, she could play the hellcat with the customers—you’d be surprised how many of them like that kind of thing—but she never complained, and the other girls seemed to dote on her.”

Marcus and I exchanged a quick, puzzled look. The statement didn’t match the pattern we’d come to expect concerning the victims. As we followed Ann down a dirty little corridor that ran among the partitioned rooms in the back, Marcus puzzled with this apparent inconsistency, then nodded and murmured to me, “Wouldn’t you mind your manners around someone you’d been sold in bondage to? Let’s wait and see what the rest of the girls say. Boys, I mean.” He shook his head. “Damn it, now they’ve got me doing it.”

The other boys who worked in the Golden Rule, however, provided no information that substantially contradicted their whoremistress. Standing in the narrow corridor and individually interviewing over a dozen painted youths as they exited from their partitioned rooms (forced, all the while, to listen to the obscene grunts, groans, and declarations of lust that emerged from those confines), Marcus and I were consistently presented with a portrait of Ali ibn-Ghazi that lacked any angry or obstreperous details. It was disturbing, but we had no time to dwell on it, for the last rays of daylight were fading and we needed to examine the outside of the building. As soon as the room Ali had regularly used, which faced an alleyway behind the club, had been vacated by a furtive pair of men and an exhausted-looking boy, we entered it, braving the warm, humid atmosphere and the smell of sweat in order to check Marcus’s theory about the killer’s method of movement.

Here, at least, we found what we were looking for: a filthy window that could be opened, above which were four stories of sheer, unencumbered brick wall leading to the roof of the building. We would need to get a look at that roof before the sun set fully; nevertheless, as we left the little chamber, I paused long enough to ask one momentarily idle boy in a neighboring room what time Ali had left the Golden Rule on the night of his death. The young man frowned and struggled with the question a bit as he stared in a cheap slab of decaying mirror.

“Damn me—that’s peculiar, ain’t it?” he said, in a tone that seemed too jaded to be coming from so young a mouth. “Now that you mention it, I don’t remember ever seeing him go.” He threw up a hand and went on with his work. “But I was probably engaged. It was the weekend, after all. One of the other girls must’ve seen her leave.”

But the same question, put a few more times to various painted faces as we walked out of the club, brought similar answers. Ali’s departure, then, had almost certainly been effected through the window in his room, and then up the rear wall of the building. Marcus and I ran outside, up to the first-floor entrance and the small vestibule, then into a vermin-infested staircase that wound up to a pitch-black doorway splattered with tar that opened onto the roof. Our quick movements were inspired by more than the dying sunlight: we both knew that we were tracing our killer’s steps more precisely than we’d been able to do before, and the effect was both chilling and exhilarating.

The roof was like any other in New York, spotted with chimneys, bird droppings, ramshackle utility sheds, and the odd bottle or cigarette end that indicated the occasional presence of people. (Because it was early in the spring and still chilly, there were none of the signs of regular habitation—chairs, tables, hammocks—that would appear during the summer months.) Like a hunting dog, Marcus strode directly to the back of the slightly sloped rooftop and, with no thought to the height, peered over and into the alley. Then he removed his coat, spread it below him, and lay down on his stomach so that his head hung out over the edge of the building. A broad smile came to his face within moments.

“The same marks,” he said without turning. “All consistent. And here—” His eyes focused on a close spot and he picked something that was invisible to me out of one of the many patches of tar. “Rope fibers,” he said. “He must’ve anchored it to that chimney.” Following Marcus’s pointing finger, I glanced at a squat brick structure toward the front of the roof. “That’s a lot of rope. Plus the other pieces of equipment. He’d need a bag of some kind to carry it all in. We ought to mention that when we’re asking around.”

Studying the monotonous expanse of the other roofs on the block I said, “He probably wouldn’t have come up through this building’s staircase—he’s smarter than that.”

“And he’s familiar with getting around on rooftops,” Marcus answered, as he got to his feet, pocketed some of the rope fibers, and picked up his coat. “I think we can be pretty sure, now, that he’s spent a lot of time on them—probably in some kind of professional capacity.”

I nodded. “So it wouldn’t be tricky for him to size up every building on the block, find the one with the least activity, and use its staircase.”

“Or ignore the staircases altogether,” Marcus said. “Remember, it’s late at night—he could scale the walls without anybody seeing him.”

Looking to the west, I saw that the reflective expanse of the Hudson River was quickly turning from bright red to black. I turned fully around twice in the near-darkness, seeing the entire area in a new way.

“Control,” I mumbled.

Marcus stayed right with me: “Yes,” he said. “This is his world, up here. Whatever mental turmoil Dr. Kreizler sees in the bodies, this is very different. On these rooftops he’s acting with complete confidence.”

I sighed and shook as a river breeze hit us. “The confidence of the devil himself,” I mumbled, and was surprised when I got an answer:

“Not the devil, sir,” said a small, frightened voice from somewhere back by the door to the stairs. “A saint.”