The Alienist

CHAPTER 18

Who’s there?” Marcus said sharply, moving toward the voice cautiously. “Come out, or I’ll have you up for interfering with police business!”

“No, please!” the voice answered, and then one of the painted youths from the Golden Rule, one I didn’t recall having seen downstairs, stepped out from behind the stairway door. The makeup on his face was badly smudged, and he had a blanket pulled around his shoulders. “I only want to help,” he said in a pathetic voice, his brown eyes blinking nervously. With a sinking feeling I realized that he could not have been more than ten years old.

Taking hold of Marcus’s arm and pulling him back, I urged the boy forward. “That’s all right, we know you do,” I said. “Just come out into the open.” Even in the increasingly dim light of the rooftop I could see that the boy’s face, as well as the blanket he was huddled in, were smudged with soot and tar. “Have you been here all night?” I guessed.

The boy nodded. “Ever since they told us.” He was starting to weep. “This wasn’t supposed to happen!”

“What?” I asked urgently. “What wasn’t? The murder?”

At the mention of the word the boy clamped his small hands over his ears and shook his head insistently. “He was supposed to be good, Fatima said so, everything was supposed to turn out all right!”

I went over, put an arm around the boy, and guided him to a low wall that separated the roof we were on from that of the building next door. “All right,” I said. “It’s all right, nothing more’s going to happen.”

“But he could come back!” the boy protested.

“Who?”

“Him—Fatima’s saint, the one that was supposed to take him away!”

Marcus and I glanced at each other quickly: Him. “Look,” I said to the boy quietly, “suppose you start by telling me your name.”

“Well,” the boy sniffed, “downstairs they—”

“Just forget what they call you downstairs, for a minute.” I rocked his shoulders a bit with my arm. “You just tell me what name you were born with.”

The boy paused, his big eyes taking our measure warily. I must admit the situation was quite confusing for me, too; all I could think to do was pull out a handkerchief and begin wiping the paint from the boy’s face.

It did the trick. “Joseph,” the boy murmured.

“Well, Joseph,” I said chummily. “My name’s Moore. And this man is Detective Sergeant Isaacson. Now—suppose you come clean about this saint of yours.”

“Oh, he wasn’t mine,” Joseph answered quickly. “He was Fatima’s.”

“You mean Ali ibn-Ghazi’s?”

He nodded rapidly. “She—he—Fatima had been saying for I guess about two weeks that she’d found a saint. Not like a patron saint, in church, not like that—just a person who was kind, and was going to take her away from Scotch Ann to live with him.”

“I see. I guess you knew Ali pretty well, then?”

Another nod. “He was my best friend in the club. All the girls liked her, of course, but we were special friends.”

I had pretty well cleaned up Joseph’s face, and he turned out to be quite a handsome, appealing young man. “It seems Ali got along with everyone,” I remarked. “Customers, too, I guess.”

“Where’d you hear that?” Joseph answered, his words coming faster and faster. “Fatima hated working here. He always made it seem to Scotch Ann like he liked it, because he didn’t want to go back to his father. But he hated it, and when he was alone with a customer, well—he could get pretty angry. But some customers—” The boy turned away, very clearly perplexed.

“Go on, Joseph,” Marcus said. “It’s all right.”

“Well…” Joseph turned from one to the other of us. “Some customers, they like it when you don’t like it.” His eyes turned down to gaze at his feet. “Some even pay more for it. Scotch Ann always thought Fatima was pretending, to make more money. But she really did hate it.”

A sharp jab of both physical revulsion and deep sympathy hit me somewhere in the abdomen, and Marcus’s face betrayed a similar reaction; but we did have an answer to our earlier question.

“There it is,” Marcus whispered to me. “Hidden, but real—resentment and resistance.” He spoke aloud to Joseph: “Did any of the customers ever get mad at Fatima?”

“Once or twice,” the boy said. “But mostly, like I say, they liked it.”

There was a lull in the talk, and then the sound of an elevated train on Third Street jarred me back to business. “And this saint of his,” I said. “This is very important, Joseph—did you ever see him?”

“No, sir.”

“Did Fatima ever meet a man on the roof?” Marcus asked. “Or did you ever notice someone carrying a large bag of some kind?”

“No, sir,” Joseph said, a bit bewildered. Then he brightened, trying to please us: “The man came in more than once after Fatima met him, though. I do know that. But he told her never to say who he was.”

Marcus smiled just a bit. “A customer, then.”

“And you never guessed which one it was?” I asked.

“No, sir,” Joseph answered. “Fatima said that if I kept it all secret and was good, then maybe the man would take me away, too, someday.”

I put my arm back around his shoulders tightly, looking out over the rooftops once more. “You must hope that doesn’t ever happen, Joseph.” I said, and then his brown eyes began to shed tears again.

The Golden Rule didn’t yield any more significant information that evening, nor did the other residents of the building or the block that we questioned. Before departing the scene, however, I felt I ought to ask the boy Joseph if he wanted to leave Scotch Ann’s employ—he seemed entirely too young for such business, even by disorderly house standards, and I thought there was a good chance that I could get Kreizler to take him on as a charity case at the Institute. But Joseph, orphaned since age three, had already had his fill of institutes, orphanages, and foster homes (not to mention alleyways and empty railroad cars), and nothing I said about Kreizler’s place being “different” had any effect on him. The Golden Rule had been the only home he’d ever known where he hadn’t been ill fed and beaten—repulsive as she might be, Scotch Ann had an interest in keeping her boys relatively healthy and scar-free. That fact counted for more with Joseph than anything I might say about the place’s evils and dangers. In addition, his suspicions about men who promised a better life somewhere else had only been heightened by the saga of Ali ibn-Ghazi and his “saint.”

Sad as it made me, Joseph’s decision was unappealable: in 1896 there was no way to go over the boy’s head and persuade a government agency (such as those created in recent years) to forcibly remove him from the Golden Rule. American society did not then generally recognize (as much of it still does not) that children might not be fully responsible for their own actions and decisions: childhood has never been viewed by most Americans as a separate and special stage of growth, fundamentally different from adulthood and subject to its own rules and laws. By and large children were and are seen as miniature adults, and according to the laws of 1896 if they wanted to abandon their lives to vice, that was their business—and their lookout. And so there seemed to be nothing for me to do but say goodbye to that frightened little ten-year-old, and wonder if he wouldn’t be the next boy to cross paths with the butcher who was haunting such disreputable houses as the Golden Rule; but then, just as I was leaving the place, an idea occurred to me, one that I thought might both help keep Joseph safe and advance our investigation.

“Joseph,” I said, kneeling down to speak to him in the entranceway to the club, “do you have many friends who work in other places like this?”

“Many?” he answered, putting a finger to his mouth pensively. “Let’s see—I guess I do know some. Why?”

“I want you to tell them what I’m going to tell you. The man who killed Fatima has killed other children who do this kind of work—mostly boys, though maybe not only boys. The main thing to remember is that for some reason that we don’t understand yet they all come from houses like yours. So I want you to tell your friends that from now on they’ve got to be very, very careful about their customers.”

Joseph reacted to this rather urgent statement by drawing back a bit and looking up and down the street fearfully. But he didn’t run away. “Why only places like this?” he asked.

“Like I say, we don’t know. But he’ll probably be back, so tell everyone you know to keep their eyes open. Look for someone who gets angry when any of you are”—I strained for a word—“difficult.”

“You mean uppity?” Joseph asked. “That’s what Scotch Ann calls it—uppity.”

“Right. He may have picked Fatima because of it. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. But watch for it. And, most important of all—don’t go anywhere with anyone. Never leave the club, no matter how nice the man seems or how much money he offers you. The same goes for your friends. All right?”

“Well—okay, Mr. Moore,” Joseph answered slowly. “But maybe—maybe you and Detective Sergeant Isaacson can come back and check on us, sometime. Those other cops, the ones that were here this morning, they didn’t seem to care much. They just told everybody to keep quiet about Fatima.”

“We’ll try to do that,” I answered, taking a pen and a piece of paper from my coat pocket. “And if you ever have anything you want to tell someone, anything at all that you think is important, you come straight to this address during the day, and to this one at night.” I gave him not only our headquarters location but also the number of my grandmother’s house on Washington Square, wondering for an instant what the old girl would make of this boy if he ever did show up. Then I had him write down the telephone number of the Golden Rule. “Don’t go to any other cops—tell us everything first. And don’t tell any other cops that we were here.”

“Don’t worry,” the boy answered quickly. “You’re the first two cops I ever met that I’d talk to, anyway.”

“That’s probably because I’m not a cop,” I said with a smile.

The grin was returned, and with a start I realized that I was seeing someone else’s face echoed in Joseph’s features. “You didn’t seem like one,” the boy said. Then his brows knotted up with another question: “So why are you trying to find out who killed Fatima?”

I put a hand on the boy’s head. “Because we want to stop him.” Just then the harsh sound of Scotch Ann’s gravelly voice came bursting out of the Golden Rule’s front hall, and I nodded in its direction. “You’d better go. Remember what I said.”

At a quick, youthful pace Joseph disappeared back into the club, and I stood up to find Marcus smiling at me.

“You handled that pretty well,” he said. “Spent much time around kids?”

“Some,” I answered, without elaborating. I had no desire to reveal how much young Joseph’s eyes and smile had reminded me of my own dead brother’s at the same age.

As we walked back across town, Marcus and I discussed the new lay of things. Sure now that the man we sought was well acquainted with places like the Golden Rule and Paresis Hall, we tried to identify who other than customers would regularly investigate such haunts. The idea of a reporter or social essayist like Jake Riis—a man out to reveal the evils of the city and perhaps driven to mad extremities by overexposure to vice—occurred to us, but just as quickly we realized that no one had yet made much of a print crusade out of child prostitution, and certainly not out of homosexual child prostitution. That left us with missionaries and other church workers, a category that seemed more promising: remembering what Kreizler had said about the connection between religious manias and mass murder, I wondered if indeed we were dealing with someone determined to be the hand of a wrathful god on this earth. Kreizler had said he didn’t consider a religious motivation likely, but Kreizler could be wrong about that—after all, missionaries and church workers were known to travel frequently by rooftops when doing their tenement work. Marcus and I were ultimately led away from such a hypothesis, however, by what Joseph had told us. The man who had killed Ali ibn-Ghazi had come to the Golden Rule regularly, and his visits had gone unnoticed. Any reforming crusader worth his salt would have worked hard to be the center of attention.

“Whoever or whatever he is,” Marcus announced, as we closed back in on Number 808 Broadway, “we know one thing—that he can come and go unnoticed. He looks completely as if he belongs in those houses.”

“Right,” I said. “Which brings us back to customers, which means it could be almost anyone.”

“Your theory about an angry customer might still work. Even if he’s not a transient, he still might’ve been fleeced one too many times.”

“I’m not so sure. I’ve seen men who’ve been robbed by whores. They might beat the living daylights out of one of them, but the kind of mutilation we’ve seen? He’d have to be mad.”

“Then maybe we’re back to another one of the Ripper theories,” Marcus said. “Maybe his brain’s deteriorating from disease—a disease he picked up in a place like Ellison’s or the Golden Rule.”

“No,” I answered, flattening my hands out in front of me and trying to make it all clearer in my mind. “The one constant we’ve been able to hold on to is that he’s not crazy. We can’t question that now.”

Marcus paused, and then spoke carefully: “John—you’ve asked yourself, I suppose, what’ll happen if some of Kreizler’s basic assumptions are wrong?”

Taking a deep, weary breath I said, “I’ve asked myself.”

“And your answer?”

“If they’re wrong, then we’ll fail.”

“And you’re satisfied with that?”

We’d reached the southwest corner of Eleventh Street and Broadway, where trolley cars and carriages were lugging all manner of weekend revelers up- and downtown. Marcus’s question hung in the air over this scene for a moment, causing me to feel very detached from the normal rhythms of city life and very uneasy about the immediate future. What, indeed, would all this terrible learning we were doing amount to if our basic assumptions were wrong?

“It’s a dark road, Marcus,” I finally said quietly. “But it’s the only road we’ve got.”